Diary of a CIC #1

#diaryofacic is a series of short articles by our founder taking you, the members of our community, on the journey with us.

Two questions I’m often asked are:

1. Are you a running club?

2. How long has Peak Running being going?

And the short answers (for the TLDRers), are: No and 7 years.

For those with some brew left in your cup, and because a few of you have said that we should share more about our story and what happens behind the scenes, I’ll expand on those.

No, we’re not a running club. We’re a company – a not-for-profit community interest company (CIC).

The reason we set it up as a company rather than a running club is that our mission was to help, engage with and inspire people with their running no matter who they were and regardless of whether they were members of a club, group or not.

Plus, we didn’t want to compete with the clubs that already existed, either to attract members away or to have affiliated members of our own competing against rival clubs in our events. We wanted to put on events and activities that brought clubs and the wider running community together.

The reason for choosing a CIC (rather than say a charity setup) model and what that entails is something I’ll perhaps say more about in a future post.

How old are we?

There’s a few dates over the span of a couple of years which I could say is our DOB. When the idea first came about, when the first form was sent to Companies House, when we held our first race, when I first did a coaching consultation, and perhaps a few others. And I've probably given a number of those as answer over the years.

But to nail it down, and so we’ve kind of got a birthday to celebrate in the years to come – I’m going to go with 19th January 2017. Which was the date of the first invoice sent to my first coaching client. So, it’s our birthday next Friday! YAY!

I hope to share more about both our story to date and what we’ve got planned for the future over the coming weeks.

And if there’s anything particularly YOU would like to know more about, please do let us know.

The photo is Chris and I, looking and feeling a lot more youthful that we do know, at our first Peak District Weekender in the summer of 2017.

Andy Brooks (Brooksie)

#diaryofacic #ourstory #communityinterestcompany #runningcommunity