10-week training clinics hit the ground

Clara Nikkel (No. 752) and her mother, Amanda Nikkel (751), approach the finish line of the 2012 Women Can Run/Walk 5K in Conway, demonstrating the fitness they achieved through 10 weeks of training with the Women Run Arkansas clinic in their hometown, Batesville.
Clara Nikkel (No. 752) and her mother, Amanda Nikkel (751), approach the finish line of the 2012 Women Can Run/Walk 5K in Conway, demonstrating the fitness they achieved through 10 weeks of training with the Women Run Arkansas clinic in their hometown, Batesville.

— Across Arkansas, hundreds of women are on their mark, getting set, about to go.

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Carol Waddle (left) won’t be wearing her walking cast when she and Betty Williams lead the 2013 Bryant Women Run Arkansas clinic at the Bryant High School track. Waddle is the clinic director.

This week and next, women, girls (and shhhh, a few guys) will begin gathering at school tracks and public parks in 44 cities across the state. They’ll meet to stretch, walk and run twice a week, usually for an hour at a time, for the next 10 weeks.

Their goal? Teaching one another how to do a 5K.

Women Run Arkansas’ free training clinics are back for a 16th year. The basic model is the same as it ever was: women volunteering to help other women get off the couch and go a distance, 3.1 miles. But this time, the statewide clinic director is not Linda Starr of the Sporty Runner in Conway; Tambra Clement of Conway has assumed that role.

And while once again, in May, those who make it through their three-month program will travel to Conway for the annual Women Can Run/Walk 5K, that race has a new starting location and course (see accompanying story).

But as usual, hundreds of volunteers have made their commitments and details are falling into place for a program that remains much the same as -

Wait! says Bruce Oakley, who is helping wife Suzi publicize a clinic for Batesville. Make that45 cities with clinics, because volunteers have just stepped up to lead one for the women of Hope.

The number of clinics exceeds 45 because some cities have two separate groups. For instance, Little Rock is adding to its longtime, popular clinic at J.A. Fair High School a new group that will meet in Midtown on Scott Field, the Forest Heights Middle School track.

Also, Linda Fason, longtime director of the group at Fair, has handed her job off to co-directors Rebecca Mullen and Katie McManners.

Details such as who’s in charge and where a group will meet could change on a dime as all these busy people working in all these cities try to find safe venues where three to 500 people can park their cars. If they can’t get access to a track, they need some other measurable distance for training. They all also need to drum up some small-group leaders, inspirational speakers and sponsors to donate supplies like water.

So how can a woman know if there’s a group meeting near her?

“Go to this website, womenrunarkansas.net,” says Jeanne Puelma, newly minted director of the Midtown Little Rock clinic, which had 125 women already registered Wednesday. The database posted there has “hot” links to clinic leaders’ e-mail addresses as well as phone numbers.

The site is also the place to register for a clinic, and if you can, download the insurance waiver to take to your first session. And it has the registration link to the “graduation event” 5K.

WOMEN CAN RUN

Every clinic is different from every other clinic, but there is a general pattern.

In Bryant, Carol Waddle will meet her participants - by tradition called “the ladies” - at 5:30 p.m. Tuesdays and 3 p.m. Sundays at Bryant High School. As in other locations, the ladies are expected to work out a third time on their own, following training schedules provided by clinic leaders.

These schedules are tailored to different fitness levels. Most clinics provide them for beginning, intermediate and advanced runners and walkers, and small-group leaders take charge of each group. Bryant will have two groups of beginning runners, Beginner A and Beginner B.Beginner A will be for off-the sofa beginners; Beginner B’s will have done a little running.

Already 50 people have used the website to sign up for Bryant’s clinic. The city didn’t have its own group last year after longtime volunteer Kathryn Wishard moved to Northwest Arkansas (where she has once again signed on to lead a clinic for Bentonville and Rogers).

“I’ve always been a participant in a clinic for the last five years,” Waddle says, laughing at her readiness to see five years as forever. “It was heavy on my heart last year that we didn’t have one in Bryant, so I enrolled in the one in Benton because I wanted to work on my own set of running skills.

“But then last year I ruptured my Achilles tendon playing basketball in December.” After eight “life-altering” weeks on crutches, she expected to have her walking cast removed last week, and her doctor says she’ll be able to walk in a brace, but no running until August.

“So I thought, ‘OK, God, I got it. I’ll volunteer this year because I can’t run.’ I still want to be involved with the sport and I love the run clinic.” In fact, she says, a Women Run Arkansas clinic was her first experience as a runner.

Waddle, 44, is a human resource manager at the Criminal Justice Institute. She was out of shape when she met Betty Williams, who is an administrative aide (Williams prefers “a secretary type”) for the institute’s Rural Executive Management Institute Project, and to hear Waddle tell it, a one-woman inspiration factory.

How so? Well, at the recent Texarkana Run the Line Half Marathon, Williams placed first in her age division - 75-79.

“Betty Williams was the one that took me to the gym and said, ‘You can do this. You can run,’” Waddle says. “Then I saw something at the library about the Women Can Run clinic. I decided to sign up. I did a beginning runner [schedule] that year and I just loved it. I looked forward to it every week.

“You get to know the other ladies. I’ve made lifelong friends. … Well, life long. Five years. I’m hoping they’ll be life long!”

Williams, 76, has agreed to lead a beginning runner group. She thinks it will help her get out of the house. But then, that Texarkana half marathon was far from Williams’ first long-distance event. Of 15 races she completed in 2012, two were marathons.

“I don’t stay home,” Williams says. “My driver’s license has got a number and then it says ‘NFH.’ My sister says it means ‘Not Found at Home.’ My baby sister said, ‘That’s why you’re not home, baby.’”

Williams has been a regular participant on weekends with Tom and Hobbit Singleton’s training group for the Little Rock Marathon, and she holds them up as exemplars of great coaching she intends to emulate. “Tom and Hobbit Singleton are a blessing to the community and I hope everybody knows that,” she says. As they do, she figures she’ll give her ladies her phone number, and Waddle has an e-mail address ladies can use.

LITTLE ROCK

Waddle and Williams already know they won’t be allowed to use the Bryant track every week, because the high school needs it too, so they’ll run around the parking lots. Sharing a school track is a negotiation everywhere. For instance, Puelma isn’t certain how often Little Rock’s new Midtown group will have access to Scott Field.

“We are going to be meeting on Mondays and Thursdays at 6 p.m.,” she says. “Currently we have about 125 participants registered for that group. Obviously the bulk of them are beginners.

“I’m a nervous wreck because I’ve never done this before. But I figure it will all work itself out.”

Across town with the clinic that will meet at Fair for its 12th year in a row, McManners and Mullen will be trusting things to work out too. “We are replacing longtime leader Linda Fason,” McManners says. “Notice it took two of us to take the reins from her.”

Their clinic will meet at 6 p.m. Mondays and Thursdays.

“We have a motto this year, thanks to Zig Ziglar,” McManners adds. “‘You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.’ We’ll recite it every clinic.”

GROUP SUPPORT

Mottos, T-shirts, e-mail blasts, Facebook pages - volunteers are trying many tactics to recruit participants and ensure they persevere in a program with a dropout rate they estimate ranges from a tenth to a third in most clinics. Waddle thinks the dropout rate can be even higher, as much as 50 percent in a small group.

The early stages of cardiovascular endurance exercise like running and walking are not easy. If they were easy, who would need all this group support?

Women have to overcome inertia; they have to figure out how to rearrange work and home schedules; and then if you throw kids into the mix - “Bryant is the baseball mecca of the world, seems like,” Waddle says - if the group support isn’t vivid and sincere, the struggle loses its appeal. People quit.

Among Bryant’s strategies is an earlier-than-some start time: 5:30 p.m. Tuesdays. “That excluded some people, I know, but our thought was most people could come straight from work to the track, get it done. Once you go home, you’re home, you know?”

Also, she’ll ask her group leaders to stay in touch with their people, “send out e-mails to their groups: ‘Hey, we missed you’ or ‘Hope you can make it to the next one.’To check in on them and see how they’re doing. I’m hoping that one-on-one contact with their leader might entice them to come back instead of just dropping out.”

Williams thinks it will help women who miss a session or two to understand that constant attendance isn’t mandatory and that they will be welcome any time they show. “They have to fit it into what is available to them,” she says. “But if they can get there and train and see the end result when they do the 5K, they’ll just be elated with themselves.”

Waddle adds, “If they can keep that goal in mind I think it’s enough motivation to keep them going through the program.

“I don’t know what to expect really, but I’m just hoping that by making it more personal and talking about real life things and letting the ladies know that most of us have gone through the clinic - ‘We know what you’re feeling, here are some things to get over it and this is our experience’ - that they’ll keep coming.”

And they even might make some lifelong friends.

5K ‘graduation’ waits at finish line

The 2013 Women Can Run/Walk 5K will be the “graduation event” for participants in Women Run Arkansas’ 10-week series of group training clinics.

For its 16th year, the May 11 race has a new course certified as at least 3.1 miles long, meeting the standards of USA Track & Field. Instead of starting at the Conway Regional Surgery Center as the race usually does, it will begin at Conway High School West.

Although a few men participate in the Women Run Arkansas training series that prepares women for this 5K, the race only admits women and girls. It includes a mother/daughter division as well as age divisions.

Registration, which costs $20, is available online at womenrunarkansas.net until midnight May 7. There will be no race-day registration.

As usual, the traditional pre-race pasta party is not included in the registration fee. It will be held at 6:30 p.m. May 10 in the St. Joseph Catholic Church Parish Hall; admission costs $20.

ActiveStyle, Pages 23 on 02/25/2013

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