If you want to get into running, people will give you the same three pieces of advice: buy a good pair of trainers, warm up properly and join a run club. Now, the first bit about trainers is absolutely true. Get your shoes even slightly wrong and you’ll end up with blisters, hip ache and more. Warming up is always a good thing, although what that looks like will differ from person to person (I prefer a very slow kilometre jog, while others like to do dynamic stretching). The third thing – about running with other people – is the advice I’ve always doubted.

Despite having run pretty much every other day for the past decade, the thought of joining Parkrun or a running club is still a terrifying one. I’ve done Parkrun twice and it was fine but it felt more like a local race than a community activity. My weekend warrior friends who go every week are forever boasting about post-park coffees and meet-ups with other runners. On the couple of occasions I went, no one even looked me in the eye, let alone asked if I wanted to stay for a coffee. 

I also love racing. I’ve run umpteen marathons and half-marathons, and always loved the feeling of being swept along with the shoal. But despite all of that, I’ve never been able to get on board with club running.

So, I was dismayed to find that, on moving flat, a group of runners cantered up my road every Thursday evening just before Dragons Den started. Every week, I’d be sitting on my sofa about to tuck into my dinner, only to hear the pitter-patter of trainers striding up and down the hill. After a few weeks of watching through the curtains, I needed to know who these maniacs were, so I posted a video of them on Instagram to see if anyone knew. I didn’t want to join them; it was just curiosity.

The online running community being as it is, however, plenty of people knew exactly which run club it was and within 24 hours, I’d been email-introduced to the founders of YFR (Your Friendly Runners) and cajoled into coming along for a session. 

The following Thursday dawned, and there in my diary sat ‘YFR – 7.15pm’. I kept looking at it, wondering whether I should go to the gym instead. Or the pub. Or yoga. Perhaps my partner wouldn’t feel up to it, or a better offer would turn up just in time. I asked my colleague whether I should go, and to my horror, she said yes. I texted my partner, who said he’d already told people he was going to his first run club and there was no way out of it. So, I turned to Twitter to see if I was the only person who dreaded the thought of running with other people.

And I’m far from being alone. “I’m the same. I don’t even want to run 5k with other people,” one person replied, while another said that group running was “one of the many reasons I’ll never do a Parkrun. People”. Even if you’re out running and you run into a group of runners, it can be jarring: “If I happen to meet a running club when I’m running, I want to cry,” someone told me. “That’s why I eat porridge pots in my hotel room before a marathon. I can’t sit with the ‘real’ runners.”

It’s not about not being able to run. I can run. I run loads. “For me it’s not the people, nor the self consciousness/embarrassment of being too slow for the group and holding them up,” one runner explained. “I much prefer to do my own thing at my own pace.”

And I’m the same; I don’t like organised fun or being made to do stuff I don’t want to do. But when it comes to drills like hill sprints, most of us never want to do them. I live on a massive hill and, at most, I’ll run to the top at the end of a session. I’ve never gone up and down with any intent because it’s bloody painful.

Nervously, I turned up to the meeting spot after a very gentle 2k jog and found that true to their name, they were all seriously friendly runners. People spoke to us, encouraged and whooped when we ran faster. Everyone was chatting without it being that forced over-friendliness. And we ran 13 reps of the hill, which on Strava won me by bronze, silver and all-time PBs for that hill. I was actually amazed at the speed I managed to run up on the last rep, pushed along by the people running around me.

Needless to say, I felt incredible sitting on my sofa, watching The Apprentice after the session. The sense of accomplishment, as well as the full-body fatigue, was overwhelming. While I love running alone or with one other person, I finally clocked why people do run in groups – at least for hills.

So, if you are intrigued about turning up to a club at some point, what can you do to ease the nerves (because it is bloody nerve-wracking, no matter what club members might have you believe)?

Sports psychologist Dr Josie Perry says that she “100% feels the same” about running in a pack. Because of that, she’s come up with some tools to reduce group-running anxiety. “I now always plan in advance a few questions I can ask (people love being asked about themselves) and that takes the edge off worrying. The very worst that can happen is you don’t go back but you have learnt a new route. The best: you make amazing friends.”

She’s right: the guy who led our session was so friendly that he made it impossible to feel out of place. But when we started running, I kept to the back to find my pace and spent the first couple of laps asking another runner about why they’d joined the club, where they lived and their experiences of Covid (an easy topic on which everyone’s got an opinion). 

That five-minute, pretty one-sided conversation built my confidence to chat to other runners once we’d finished, and by the time the session ended, I’d chatted to most of the group. So, aside from finally understanding what a proper hill sprint session actually involves, I may just have picked up a new local crowd to go to the pub with. 

For more running tips and stories, check out the Strong Women Training Club.

Images: Getty