Quote Originally Posted by Clash City Rocker View Post
Pretty sure all 3 of CVFR junior races will be doing the same. Thats sounding like a decent series. Small juniors just joining the sport dont always want to a) travel long distances to championship races and b) get their arses kicked when they are there so good to have smaller low key local races to put into a series.
I'm with CCR on this one. Clayton juniors haven't been around for very long but we've always tried to emphasise participation and commitment, trusting that performance will follow (provided that we, as coaches, do our job properly).

I've not bothered pushing the champs races unless they happen to be local. I wouldn't travel any great distance just to get my butt kicked so it's unreasonable to encourage others to do so; the end result is just demoralising and counter productive. We didn't bother publicising the english schools event for the same reason (plus the fact that it was being held at the arse end of nowhere didn't help!).

Another issue for us is that we are not just a fellrunning club and, even if we were, I'd encourage junior runners to broaden their scope anyway.We target XC and local park races as well, in an effort to emphasise speed & technique as well as hills and rough terrain.

However, I will be looking at the BOFRA events for next year. If I can work out how to incorporate them into our club champs then I will do, if not then we can still promote a few of them if they're not too far away. An issue for us is that we have a training session on a Saturday so everybody misses a session every time we race instead (even if they're not attending the race themselves). We need to work out how to do an outdoor evening session over the winter; headtorches all round I think!

As an aside; I can recommend parkrun as an excellent training tool. We've seen several of our junior really progress for having done parkrun over the summer.