For those of you who are not aware, I thought I would give you an update on how the Benfleet Juniors Running club is going.

We started in August, and have run 8 session outdoors on the recreational ground near the club house. Over the eight weeks we had a total of 30 Juniors attending. The most at any one session was 18.

We ran relays, 60m time trials, games and slightly longer runs.
The age groups were from 8 years old to 14 year olds, and the quickest 60m time trial was sub 9:30 seconds !

Now winter is here we have the luxury of using the sports hall at Appelton School (Tuesdays 6-7pm) and our first indoor session last week had 18 juniors attending.

We have a minimum of 5 Leaders running each session, taken from the pool of Andy Frith, Clive Hopkins, Debbie Smith, Graham Booty, Julia Binstead, Karl Cadman, Sarah Norton, Tony Phillips, and Jez Mancer.

A few of us have recently attended First Aid courses and last Saturday Clive, Andy, Graham and myself attended a UK:A Children in Athletics course. This was a very good course, showing how sessions could be run, and meant Graham could be an 8 year old again. This course was personally funded by those attending.

Clive and myself have attended the UKA Protecting and Safeguarding Children course, and all our Leaders are being CRB checked. This is a requirement when working with children, The club is applying for Sport England's Clubmark, which is awarded to clubs by National Governing Bodies (NGB) when the club is able to demonstrate that it meets the NGBs criteria as to playing programme; safeguarding and protecting children; sports equity and ethics and club management.

Clive has secured a grant for some of the training costs, as well as donating "tea-money" from his Cafe, and through the recent Shopzilla web advert I have secured extra money to be spent on equipment, etc. Mike Moreton has started the ball rolling with a monthly raffle to also raise funds (all donations gratefully received)

We have a Lottery Awards for All grant application going through, which I will put in the post after the strikes.
If successful this should enable us to purchase equipment, and fund further training.

We have collected over 1600 Tesco Sports vouchers so far, and have until November to amass as many as we can.

We will use these to "buy" extra equipment.

The Junior Club is going from strength to strength, with attendance at the recent races including the Epping XC races, and Great North Junior Runs, and Great South Runs. We are targeting the Junior Cross Country Champs in January.

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If you have ten minutes to spare on the way to the club, please do stick your head into the school hall and see what we are doing,

We may even get you to join in the cool-down.

The indoor junior session runs from 6pm - 7pm every Tuesday.

Extra information is on the Juniors web-site:

http://www.benfleetrunningclub.com/juniors