A group of students at the ASU Downtown campus has created a new running club to provide opportunities to combine exercising and socializing several times a week.
The group participates in Meet Me Downtown on Mondays, a weekly run/walk that goes through different locations in downtown Phoenix. Participants start at The Corner at CityScape before winding through a route that includes Heritage Square, the Arizona Center, Roosevelt Row, Margaret T. Hance Park and Civic Space Park. The loop is 3.3 miles, but individuals can change it up if they like, said Taylor Antczak, a junior who started the ASU Downtown Phoenix Running Club with Cassandra Stratton.
The student-only club also meets on Wednesday mornings and Thursday evenings, which now include Adventure Runs in Tempe, scavenger run events put on by Roadrunner Sports every third Thursday of the month.
“We kind of just leave it up to the group for that day, depending on who shows up, how we’re all feeling,” Antczak said. “If we’re all feeling good, we’ll go out for maybe four or five miles. If we’re a little down, we’ll stay closer to twoish.”
Antczak said they wanted to provide a safe and fun environment for running downtown.
“We try to provide them with as much opportunities to run and places to run as we can,” Antczak said. “We’ll lead runs every now and then, share knowledge, tips on how to run, how to recover, how to stay in shape for running.”
Antczak said her job at the downtown Sun Devil Fitness Center has helped her get the word out about the club, which proved to be successful when the group got an opportunity to host morning runs for next month’s ArtPlace America conference in Mesa. ArtPlace America is an organization focused on bringing arts and culture to community planning and development.
“They’re going to pay us, so that will hopefully help us boost our numbers to get races paid for,” said Antczak, who also said the club is looking into having T-shirts made.
Antczak, Stratton and the group’s members regularly advertise local charity races on their Facebook page, ASU Downtown Phoenix Running Club. The group plans to participate in Pat’s Run on April 23, the biggest fundraising event for the Pat Tillman Foundation, an organization devoted to military veterans.
Alyssa Kriner, an ASU sophomore studying global health and pre-med, was one of the first people to join the club, which now has five to six regular members participating in runs.
Kriner said that most of the group generally runs at the same pace for at least part of the run, allowing them to socialize and work out together.
“I just thought it’d be a good way to stay in shape and explore downtown Phoenix,” Kriner said. “I’ve never ran this far in my life, because I’m running with friends and having so much fun.”
Erin Feser, a biomechanics and kinesiology professor in the ASU College of Health Solutions who is not affiliated with the running club, taught a class at ASU last semester about the physical aspects of running called Running Into Injury. She said a challenge of running in a metropolitan environment includes the hard surfaces.
“Through a biomechanist’s eyes, when you run on sidewalk, that’s a much harder surface than running on asphalt or if you’re running on a surface like dirt or something through the woods on a trail,” Feser said.
She said another challenge of running downtown includes the constant start and stop that may accompany urban environments with lots of traffic lights. She recommends finding routes that function as nice loops, like the Meet Me Downtown route the running club participates in.
Feser said that as the weather heats up, hydration and proper cooling is also something runners should keep in mind.
“In Arizona, with the dry environment, we don’t realize how much we’re sweating sometimes because it evaporates so quickly,” Feser said. “The evaporation process is how we cool our body when we’re doing physical activity, and our body has a hard time doing that process for cooling if we have clothing or layers on on top. So in many ways, we need to have exposed skin, so our body can sweat, and the air can evaporate that off of our skin.”
Anctzak said the heat can especially impact runners who have not hydrated enough and that the group is considering earlier runs to combat the issue of heat.
“When summer comes around, we’ll probably do more early, early-morning runs and later-in-the-evening runs if we can,” she said. “If it’s too hot at night, we’ll probably just stick to the early-morning runs. Probably drop the mileage down depending on how hot it is.”
Antczak said all runners are welcome to the club and that she hopes they can enjoy running downtown.
“I hope that they find a place of comfort and a place where they’re welcome,” she said. “It doesn’t matter if you’ve never run in your life or if you’re on your fifth triathlon. It’s just something that we want you to come and join us and have fun doing and enjoy running around downtown.”
Contact the reporter at lallnatt@asu.edu
