Wicked Autumn

We’re well into the fall racing season and it is just spectacular to see the many achievements of our members. Across the club I see members hitting goals with races of all levels: 5Ks, 10Ks, half-marathons, and now some full marathons here in New England and in Europe. There are also members reaching out to participate in triathlons and ultras such as Ghost Train. It’s a great time of year to be a runner. Read on for club news!

On-Site Track Ending

One unfortunate aspect of this time of year is that we need to wind down our on-site track workouts at BHS. We’ve already backed the start time to 6:15PM as the days get shorter, however we must face the facts of the Earth’s orbit and soon it will get too dark to complete these on-site workouts. The last track workout of this year will be Tuesday October 11. For all those that were able to attend, we hope you have enjoyed this on-site program. Coach Braz and his assistant Pete have once again done a fantastic job and we are most appreciative of how they have shared their expertise in-person. We will begin on-site track again next April, usually after the Boston Marathon. However, as you know, Coach Braz will continue to email workouts year-round. I personally do these workouts on Tuesday and find them very beneficial. If you haven’t tried them, I encourage you to! It’s all part of your membership benefits.

F4 Race Committee

Our annual New Year’s Day race, the Frosty Four, will be held on (duh) January 1st, 2023! As with Miles Over The Moon, this event is very important for our club – it helps to both fund our club operations and provide for the club’s philanthropic mission. This year, Rick Kee is the F4 Race Director (thank you Rick) and is hard at work with his committee to deliver on this main event. If you are interested in being involved on the committee or volunteering at the race, please contact Rick at richardkee62@gmail.com. And please be on the watch for when the race registration is announced, we’ll need your help in getting the word out about the race. It’s only a few months away!

September Event Review

We had two great events in September, the Lone Gull 10K (a double-dip event for both USATF and WGP):

And a Sea-of-Red visit to NERC, where Wickeds braved some crazy weather to help NERC re-ignite their own weekly run. Saucony was on-site and gave out some great (free and expensive) shoes to member Nicki Rice!

October Events: WGP Race, Sea of Red, PT Visit!

We have one WGP race in October, the Newburyport Half Marathon on October 23! This is a great half for those looking for that distance this fall.

We will continue our Sea of Red series in October with a visit to Essex County Brewing on Thursday October 27, at 6PM. This is a new spot for Wicked to visit and we are excited about meeting this crew. The address is 58 Pulaski St., Peabody. There is also a Facebook page for Essex County Brewing.

We will have another visit from Allison Riley, DPT and owner of Stride PT and Wellness at the Monday BackBeat run on October 17th. Dr. Riley visited Wicked at Track this summer and provided a short seminar on breathing techniques to members. This time, Dr. Riley will be providing free injury screens to anyone experiencing a current injury or someone who is pain-free and wants a quick screen to potentially identify any areas that may benefit from mobility and/or strengthening. Dr. Riley is also offering a 10% discount to Wicked Members for further services from her company. Come on down and check it out!

Also as mentioned in a separate email, in October, our annual election cycle begins. There is a nomination period that occurs from October 15th to 30th. Several times this year the board has discussed the need to have more focus on our communications. One way of doing this is to evolve the makeup of the board to include a Communications Director. Likely, this would replace or at least amend the duties of one of the three Member-At-Large positions. If such a change were to be made, it would require a by-law amendment. The process of amending our by-laws is in Article XI of the by-laws which requires that all club members be notified of any such discussion and vote 14 days in advance. More details on this to be discussed, but we are holding a virtual Zoom meeting on October 12th at 7:15PM to discuss this. See that separate email for Zoom link.

Self-Defense Seminar
Thanks to everyone who responded to our inquiry regarding a Self-Defense Seminar. We are currently trying to nail down the details on this with the owner of the Self-Defense studio. We will do what we can to make this available. Please stay tuned for further updates.

Membership Spotlights

We are proud of all of our members, but we’d like to focus on a few in the next several updates. One is Todd Callahan from Beverly who just represented the United States at the World Masters Mountain Running Championship in Clonmel, Ireland. Todd came in 9th place in his age division! There is a very cool article published by the American Train Running Association where all the United States participants were interviewed, including Todd! Here is a picture of Todd from the article (Todd is the third on the right):

Congratulations Todd, for making the United States a player on this large stage!

Wicked Thank You

We want to give a big shout-out to Mike Fitzgerald who most recently posted several pictures of Wickeds at Lynn Woods Relay. Mike has been a Wicked Member and supporter for many years, taking pictures at several of our events. This takes a lot of effort and focus, and Mike has done this for Wicked quietly and selflessly. Thanks Mike!

Membership MattersSpeaking of Membership, we have been long aware of our need to make more updates to the outdated mechanisms we have. This started earlier this year, where we re-did the website and with it, membership registration. But we need to do more. I’ll be sending a separate email detailing this further, but for an overview of what to expect:

The new website and membership registration will automatically renew your membership with the payment mechanism used at sign-up, on the date of registration you used through the new website. These renewals will not begin until February 2023, which will be one year since the website went live. So for example, if you signed up or renewed via the new website on March 20 2022, your renewal will be processed on March 20, 2023.
Reminders are not sent before renewals are processed. If you do not want to renew, we’ll be sorry to see you leave, but please contact our membership director before your renewal date. In case you forget, we will provide refunds up to 14 days beyond the date of the renewal processing. This policy is listed on our website. Please note that processing renewals costs the club money, so we’d like to avoid having to issue refunds.
We are going to create new email distribution lists for membership. Our current membership distribution list (this one), is very outdated and contains people who have not renewed for many years. That said, we know our membership system is in dire need of updating, so it may be that we have people who have intended to renew but simply didn’t or forgot. Ultimately we will have a seperate, up-to-date list of active members that will be used for communicating club benefits, both via email and also with our vendor partners that provide discounts to Wicked members. We’ll provide a transition mechanism and period for this updating. That said, if you know you haven’t renewed, and really want to, please do so on our new site! It’ll make this process go smoother.

Again there will be separate emails describing the details of the transition as it occurs. We won’t allow anyone to fall through the cracks!

Annual Survey

This month we will be sending out a survey to our members. We are always interested in your feedback, but we thought it would be a good idea to frame up some specific questions in such a survey. It’s important to us to understand which aspects of the club you are interested in, and which ones you’d like to see developed further. At the same time, if there is something we could be doing better, we want to know that too. So please watch your inbox for this survey.

Upcoming Events

All club events (not including regular runs such as Monday BackBeat) are shown on our website’s calendar. Close on the horizon are: