The regular meeting of the Nittany Valley Running Club was held on Tuesday, October 4, at the Hi-Way Pizza on Westerly Parkway. The members on hand were Jerry Steffy, Marty Mazur, Boyd Brumbaugh, and Bob, Christine, and Kelly Rice. The turnout was small compared to recent meetings, but the discussion was enthusiastic.

The theme of the meeting might best be described as "running evangelization". Our new President Jerry Steffy is very excited about promoting running. He wants to get more people into running and more runners into active involvement with the Club. Here are some of the things we talked about doing:

• Re-design the Club brochure/application and distribute it more widely, for example at all local sporting goods stores, the Y, all the campus athletic buildings, etc.
• Post the current running calendar from our web site at some of the local sporting goods stores. Update these every couple of months. This also gives more exposure to the Club and our web site.
• Restart the effort to get RDs of the big local races, particularly the campus ones, to communicate their proposed race dates with us early. This will help prevent calendar clutter and will get races the earliest and best exposure.
  
• Get in touch with some of the other local sporting clubs, especially those that use the trails and roads in the mountains. We already have some contact with the biking groups. There are also supposedly geo-caching and "volksmarching" groups in the area.
• Look into the possibility of occasional small ads in the T&G. Also, piggy-back on ads that go in the CDT and T&G for races like Arts Fest and First Night by making sure our Club web site is prominently plugged.
  

We also talked for a while about beginning runners. A couple of things were discussed. First, beginners tend to be understandably intimidated by a lot of things that can stand in their way of participating more fully in the sport. We want to break down this wall a bit. We want to make beginners more apt so sign up for races and to come to group runs. It's great that we've set aside a Club race, the Knights 5K, particularly to encourage newbies. There is an online training program for this race, but runners are on their own with this. What we need is an actual beginner's group run where a more experienced runner can come once a week, answer questions about stretching, pacing, injuries, etc, and just encourage the runners. Hopefully we'll be able to get this going soon.

With both of the above projects, Club support is essential. If you have any ideas, or would like to help out, please contact Jerry Steffy at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Marty Mazur at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Finally, Marty said that the email election ballots were overwhelmingly supportive of our slate of officers. Marty was waiting for snail-mail ballots from people who get the paper Newsletter before "certifying" the election. There were no snail-mail ballots submitted. So it's official. Jerry Steffy is our new President. The other officers, Treasurer Dave Eggler, Secretary and Newsletter Editor Marty Mazur, and Membership Director Marty Klanchar, are staying on with your support.

Next Meeting: December 6.