The Amherst Striders
On a good morning, the sun will rise in Amherst, N.S. and brighten the faces of 50 runners as they make their way over to the Atlantic shoreline. On a bad morning, if a heavy rainfall sets in, the Amherst Striders will look at one another say “This is hell,” and continue on, each glad they’re not out there alone. This is why they started the club – to combat the challenging Maritime weather together.
The club is not even four years old and already has more than 50 regular members (as well as about 300 committed through Facebook) with three key runners heading the group. It started in 2010 when founder Ken MacKenzie’s brother encouraged him to create a club. The two siblings started running together and soon invited Alan Theal, who had been getting bored of running alone. The premise of the running club is simple: MacKenzie, Theal and third-man-in Peter Nixon wanted to create an inclusive, non-elitist group. Theal, who has taken over as coach, concedes that it’s not the most competitive running club in the area. “That’s why it doesn’t have an entry fee,” Theal admits.
Camaraderie is a word tossed around by plenty of runners but the Striders have adopted a strategy to enforce a “no runner left behind” policy. Runners of all abilities come out to the staple Monday, Wednesday and Saturday runs, meeting at the Tim Hortons in the town centre. They head out together but once the more advanced runners have broken away from the group, they loop back to join the others. “I have the army mentality – never leave a soldier behind,” says Theal, who served 35 years in the military. “If we just ran and left you, why would you join our club?”
The faster runners continue the pattern of breaking away and looping back to join the pack for the entire route. A typical route called “Fox Ranch Road” takes the runners into the country past windmills and marshes, over two major hills and then back along the main drag to the Tim Hortons, where they end their run with a group coffee on Saturdays.
“All we do is meet,” says MacKenzie, who is known as a major motivator in the club, making sure everyone has a club T-shirt and even has been known to pick up running gear with a fellow runner in mind. “It just feels like a family,” he says and goes on to explain one of the group’s most recent victories: Tom Cowles joined the group looking for a lifestyle change. He was extremely overweight when he came out on his first run. After a season with the Striders, he was able to run his first 10k and then graduated to the half. He has lost over 80 pounds and ran the Around the Bay 30k in Hamilton, Ont. Watching a person use running to make major changes like that is what it’s about for MacKenzie, who says that Cowles’s accomplishment is one of the major pay offs of founding the club. “When Tom finished his 10k…” MacKenzie trails off. “I’m getting emotional even now just thinking about what he has achieved.” That’s just one of many victories though. “I qualified for Boston and it was thanks to this group,” says Shelley Carroll, who originally wondered if running in a group would slow her down. “For me to go to Boston with that support from my peers made it even more special,” she says.
While qualifying for Boston would be a big deal for most runners, running with the group isn’t only about scoring a Boston Marathon qualifier for Carroll. She is raising three kids and works in correctional services, which isn’t stress-free. She starts the day off with an early-morning run with the group to set a positive tone for the day. “You can either be angry or you can go for a run,” she says. “But you can’t do both.”