On the beautiful, mild and dry evening of Wednesday 11th January, a staggering 30 beginning Eagles gathered in front of the Grange for the inaugural session of the first ever Ealing Eagles Beginner’s program. The publicity in Ealing Today had certainly pushed the number up.

Kelvin, Emma and myself quickly discovered that people who label themselves as beginners range from true and genuine beginners, who never ran before, all the way to people who are happy to run for 15 to 20 minutes, but struggle to take it further than that. To cater for everyone, the first session was designed around alternating 2 minutes run with a one and a half minute walk which we repeated for 30 minutes.

Talking to various participants along the way, I discovered that a lot of runners are actually the same – no matter whether you talk to our regular Ealing Eagles runners or the participants of the beginners program, they all love to get together and be active. One of the ladies on the program told me: “As long as I know that there will be other people at a certain time and a certain place, I will be happy to join them, but I just would not do it on my own”. I was therefore even more encouraged when some of the participants connected with each other on our Ealing Eagles Beginners program group on facebook to meet up for a run on Sunday.

All in all, a great and exciting start.

Nanda Griffioen