Leeds Frontrunners: Full Interview

TRANSCRIPT

Leeds Frontrunners Group
Interviewed by Ross Horsley
23rd July 2019

RH: This is Ross Horsley recording for the West Yorkshire Queer Stories project on the 23rd of July 2019. I'm here with some of the founding members of the Leeds Frontrunners and we're going to have a group interview about that subject. So if we just go around the table and introduce ourselves.

NA: Hi, my name’s Nat Adams, I'm 39, had to think there for a minute, gay, and I live in Leeds in Rawden and I'm Treasurer of the running club.

MB: My name is Matthew Brown, I'm 44 years old. I am a gay male. I'm originally from Northern Ireland, but live in Leeds in the city centre. I am club Secretary.

AF: Hi, I'm Andrew Fraser, I'm 51. I'm a gay male, pronoun he/him. I am the founder and Chair of the Leeds Frontrunners.

DB: And I am Dom Bull, gay male, age 50, originally from Durham but been in Leeds since I was about 5, or something like that, and I'm, I guess, one of the original members of Frontrunners.

RH: Thank you for that. So Andrew, as the founder, can you tell us a little bit about why you decided to set up the Frontrunners?

AF: Yes, it's probably about 6/7 years ago to be fair, a long time before it actually took off, before, when I got the idea. And I think, like people that are coming to the club now have just googled 'gay running' or 'gay sports', and there was nothing there for Leeds but they did find some in the surrounding areas, so like Manchester, Newcastle were just forming then as well. And it started from there really, so I set up like the Facebook group, which was quite popular at the time, and it probably took from there about 2 or 3 more years for it to take off, but I did sort of get help from the other Frontrunner clubs, so they were quite supportive and I was able to sort of use their experience, if you like, when setting up the Leeds club.

RH: So are the Frontrunners a national organisation?

AF: Yeah they are; they started the first club in San Francisco in the 70s, and they are yeah, they're worldwide. So we had a couple of guys here actually from Canada a couple of years ago, who had come over to Leeds for a wedding. They sort of stopped off one Saturday and came to run with us before they went to the wedding. Similarly, if you go to other countries on holiday around the globe where there's a Frontrunner club, as a member of the Frontrunners in Leeds then you're more entitled to go and run with the other clubs wherever you go basically. Which I know Matt’s done.

NA: And Dom.

RH: Do you want to tell us about those?

MB: No that's, we're not just a national club like Andrew says, we're an international club and we're part of one large Frontrunner family. And like Andrew said, it's really nice to know that if you go anywhere in the country or anywhere in the world where there's a Frontrunner club, you can join in with your large international family. Just this year, I've been to Hong Kong and was able to just drop and email through to the Hong Kong Frontrunners and join them for their regular Saturday morning run. I know Dom has done the exact same thing about 2 weeks later. We've had runners go to San Francisco and run, and run the San Francisco half marathon with San Francisco Frontrunners.

DB: I had an Instagram message from the Toronto Frontrunners this morning, telling me to meet up next time I'm over. And it's a bit of a delayed response to an email that I sent to them about 4 months ago, but better late than never. They don't seem very well organised.

NA: We had one runner who went to Dublin, and the Irish Taoiseach was a number of Dublin Frontrunners and he ran with them as well.

AF: Yeah, so it's a welcoming group really, you've got wherever you go in the world if you're sort of on your own or with friends, and you can drop into a Frontrunner club if there's one nearby.

RH: What were the early meetings of the Leeds Frontrunners like?

MB: Quiet. I remember the first run I had was with Andrew and we met at the Leeds-Liverpool canal, and we did our first run along the canal. The second one, Dom you arrived with us…

DB: Yeah, because I couldn't make the first one.

MB: …and we started to grow with one or two members over the next few months. And after maybe 4 months we had 10 people who would turn up for runs, and that's when we thought we'd take the club a little bit further. We'll get it registered with England Athletics and become an official UK-registered athletics club, but yeah they were quite quiet at the start.

RH: So you're an inclusive group for all LGBT+ people – do you have to sort of market yourself on that basis?

AF: We do, yeah. When we became affiliated with England Athletics the constitution needs to be specific to being inclusive to everyone so we can't just limit ourselves to LGBT, which we weren't doing anyway. But we need to make it clear that we’re an inclusive club – that's under the rules of the affiliation – but we are anyway so we do market ourselves but the members, at the moment, I would say everyone falls under the umbrella of L, G, B, or T. Yeah, but we do market ourselves as an inclusive club to everyone and, you know, where we've all got friends in regular running clubs as well, so yeah.

MB: One of the things that makes it a little bit more tricky for us to market is that we are an LGBT running club and most people’s running clubs are location-specific, so if you live in Roundhay you're a member of the Rounday Foxes, if you live in the Kirkstall area you're one of the Kirkstall Harriers. Whereas we're not location-specific, so our membership can come from absolutely anywhere. So at one point, we were having members travel either from Halifax one way, to, all the way over to Grimsby, where was Adele from? Scunthorpe! On a weekly basis to come and run with us, so our catchment was absolutely huge.

RH: So where do you generally run?

AF: Roundhay. We tend to run around Roundhay twice a week. Once a month we actually come to Leeds to the canal and run by the canal, meet in Granary Wharf, and that's just to allow people who… we have quite a few members who live in Leeds centre, so it just gives them the opportunity not to have to travel to Roundhay. But we chose Roundhay, initially… we did meet in Leeds centre like Matt said, but I think we chose Roundhay because it's quite a well-known and relatively central park in Leeds, that wherever you live, North, West, South, or East within Leeds you can tend to get to Roundhay fairly easily. I think that's why we chose that one.

RH: What do you think makes people want to join an LGBT running group, rather than just their closest one?

NA: I think to a certain extent, I… we are very much runners first, but there is definitely a social element to running with other people within the community, and very often we get new members turning up who are new to Leeds, and they want to meet people, and meet similarly-minded people. So we kind of then introduced a sort of social element to help support people within the community. So we do a dining club once a month, we've done… we’ve organised sort of nights out, we have barbecues and picnics and it sort of helps us bring the community a bit more together and play our part in that… We do weekends away as well, and it kind of, I think what's happened more and more is that it very much, I suppose, more feels like a family than just a running club, which is quite nice. And I think it then brings more people in. We say to people that, when they come and try it out, we offer 3 free runs before we look for any sort of commitment and, in that time period, people see what a good thing we've got going, and very much want to be part of that.

AF: Mm, yeah, we do tend to have quite a good uptake on people who come to run once with us and tend to come back and run again and join. We have probably only a handful who don't actually convert to a member, which is good.

RH: Can you give me a rough idea then of how many members you have and their sort of split in terms of sexuality and age.

MB: Yep, we currently have 50 members. There are, 16% of those are female, we are a very male-heavy club. We're doing a lot to try and diversify our groups. Members tend to be 25 to 50, although we have noticed there are Thursday runs that are starting to draw in a younger cohort who are faster than some of us oldies.

NA: And I think that's probably, to a certain extent, is because they're young professionals and giving up an evening in the week is a lot easier than sacrificing your Saturday morning and having to get up and run. But doing 2 runs basically means that we can hit a whole group of different people, I suppose.

RH: What are you doing for this year's Pride season?

MB: Ah, we… Every year for these past 3 years, we've actually been one of the first things that have taken place over the Pride weekend. We take over Woodhouse Moor Park Run, which is one of the local Park Run's close to the city, and Leeds Frontrunners take that over. We attract between 600 and 700 runners, typically, to that. In the past, we've been really fortunate that we've had sponsorship from different companies around Leeds and we've been offering lots of freebies, but this year we'll take over as normal on the Saturday. On the Sunday we represent in the parade, so we'll be there as a club team. There are about 25 members that I think are coming this year. And we're also working alongside the LGBT Fringe Festival, the sports fringe festival.

AF: Yeah, so I'm on the Chair of that as well so I've done some work on that. So we've got a sports day coming up this week, this Saturday, so all the participants within the Sports Fringe are doing some event within that sports day. That's at Roundhay Park, so we're in charge of the relay race. But there's quite a lot of events, there's 60 or 70 events I think spread over a couple of weeks prior to Pride, and our like Saturday and Thursday regular runs are promoted within that as well and the Park Run, I think the Park Run takeover map mentioned that Pride Weekend is probably the last event, I think, to take place within that Sports Fringe calendar.

RH: Have you had any transgender runners join the club?

AF: Yeah we have, we've had probably 3 or 4 during the time we've been up and running. We've got one transgender member at the moment, who is sadly injured so she's not been around for the last few months but did renew their membership so obviously does like being around us, but just isn't able to run due to injury.

RH: And do you ever have any straight people wanting to join the club?

MB: We have never had a straight member join the club. We've had lots of straight people run WITH us!

RH: Is that in special events?

MB: No, sometimes just turning up on a Saturday run. We've also, over these past few years, we've led on some Couch to 5k sessions and they're a mix of different people from all types of backgrounds, not just people from the LGBT community.

NA: Very often you might find that some of our members will have people staying for the weekend or friends who'll want to come down and run, and we welcome that.

AF: Yeah, Matt mentioned the Couch to 5k. So we got the opportunity through Leeds Girls Can to run a Couch to 5k a few months ago, or two or three months ago, and we started with about 15 women and ended up with about 9 so it was a really good retention rate for a Couch to 5k. We just went through a 9-week programme with them at Roundhay Park, so that was really good. And it was a good opportunity as well that Leeds Girls Can gave us to do that, because they normally keep it within Leeds Girls Can and their leaders, so I think it's the first time they've used another running club to run one of their Couch to 5k courses.

RH: So are they another running group, Leeds Girls Can?

AF: They're a, well I guess they're linked, I think, to Leeds City Council because the lady who put us in touch works for Leeds City Council. But they're er, I can’t remember the word but they’re an establishment that encourages women within Leeds to get involved with, not just running, but all kinds of sport or physical activity. So they're quite a big organisation. They've run quite a lot of Couch to 5k's for women.

DB: We had a guy run with us, didn't we? I can't remember the guy’s name; he was working for the council…

AF: Yeah, Ben. [From] Run Leeds.

DB: Yeah, Run Leeds. So he ran with us for a while. I think it was his job within the council to promote sort of sports within different groups.

AF: Yeah, he were quite influential was Ben Fraser when we first set the group up. He gave us half towards the four initial Run Leader courses and half towards the shirts as well. Not him personally! [Laughter] But I mean we got the funding and put it towards…

RH: What other organisations have supported you or have you worked with?

DB: Blacks?

MB: Yes, Blacks Solicitors supported us whenever we were preparing for our first Pride Run takeover…

DB: [Quietly] Are you going to say something about the rainbow laces?

MB: They provided t-shirts, laces…

AF: Well that was – was that Emsleys or…? Because Andy Smith worked for Emsleys at the time, wasn't it?

MB: Sorry, it was Emsleys.

DB: I definitely got some Blacks laces, though.

AF: But Blacks do support us, because then it moved to Blacks. So Emsleys were the first one to be fair that gave us the t-shirts and then we got Blacks…

MB: The rainbow laces.

AF…Laces, and then Emsleys gave us the plastic drinking…

MB: Water bottles.

AF: And then Blacks gave us more laces. So maybe it's the 4th year? And this year it's just us basically, we're the prize this year.

RH: Are there any difficulties that you'd say you face as an LGBT+ group, compared to maybe, you know, other running and sports groups that are out there?

AF: One that Matt mentioned is that geographical location, because we're city-wide and we've got members from Bradford, Wakefield, Doncaster, Harrogate so, and other the surrounding areas as well. But at the end of the day, we're Leeds Frontrunners so they know that if they come to us at Leeds, then that's where we'll be based. We're not going to run over to Harrogate or to Bradford. Although from time to time we may decide to do a run over there, but we are predominantly Leeds-based. So that could be an issue.

NA: I suppose the other issue is that in terms of our demographic. So having had conversations with England Athletics, it would seem that, in terms of running, it's fairly underrepresented in terms of BME because running, I think, is seen as very much a sort of a white, middle-class sport. And that's a national picture in terms of running clubs, but we would, I suppose, have a slightly different issue in terms of female representation. So looking at clubs, running clubs, nationally, there's a fairly good mix of male and female. However, when you look at gay running clubs, or LGBTQ running clubs, there seems to be a massive underrepresentation when it comes to females, potentially gay females as well. And that's… that’s true in Leeds Frontrunners, and Manchester Frontrunners, London Frontrunners. I mean, London Frontrunners has somewhere in the realms of 500 members and only about 20 of those are female. And it's something we sort of are very conscious of and constantly look at ways to try and get ourselves out there and that was kind of the reasoning behind getting behind Leeds Girls Can, thinking, well we can try and get some more, we can step in at the end of the Couch to 5k and offer support as a running club. Erm, yeah.

AF: It's something that we have been criticised on but, to be honest, having done some research, like Matt said, we've found that it's throughout the other Frontrunner clubs as well, so it isn't just us, and it’s just something…

MB: And that may be to do with the type of sport that it is, in that running is probably much more, you know, it's very much that, although we're running with a group of people, you very much are competitive by yourself, potentially it might be that team sports are more appealing. But in terms of our drive forward, we’ve kind of… Instead of trying to focus on any one particular demographic, is to just keep trying to get out there and promote how inclusive we are and hopefully we'll join demographics from all over.

AF: Yeah, it can be organic. I mean it can… similar to like when had a lot of new members last year, I think that predominantly, nearly all male members that came along, new members, and I think some of them talked to their friends about us and then their friends came along. So I think if we can get, sort of, a few female members perhaps and they tell their friends, then that could set the ball rolling there. But I think, yeah, it's just looking, sort of, nationally it seems to be an issue with the LGBT-focused running groups, but not general running groups, because there's quite a good split of male and female. So it might be that females can integrate more within regular running groups that gay males maybe tend to, not stick together, but you know, I don't know, it's something more psychological in maybe that...

DB: I think it's tricky really in any group really that has a social aspect to it… If you turn up and, you know, the gender you're interested in isn't particularly well represented are you going to go again? Maybe not. But, I think it would be the same for any sports club. I know lots of straight people at work that are in running clubs and they always mention the social aspect when they talk about why they joined. And a lot of them met partners and spouses through the running clubs etc. so there's definitely an element of that to it as well. And it's difficult to, sort of, promote I guess when as Nat said the catchment is a very specific demographic. We've got some bits of literature and stuff, and leaflets, but there's a limited range of places where you can, kind of, get them out and expect them to be spotted I guess. So yeah, there's that.

RH: People obviously join groups like this to meet people. Have you had any people who have dated, or got together?

NA: Me! [Laughter]

AF: We have but we've not had any people that have… lasted, I don't think, not that I'm aware of.

DB: Yet! [Laughter]

NA: What's funny is, I think, in terms of a running club and in terms of an LGBT club, I’ve never really felt like there's a very large promiscuous side to our runners and the running club. I think we, very much, feel like we're runners first and everything else kind of comes second to that. But yeah, it is obviously one of those things. I think because there is such camaraderie in the group, people kind of get into the group and maybe feel that that is more valuable than anything else.

AF: We have a few couples within the group, don't we? Male and female couples, you know what I mean.

NA: That were couples before they joined the group? Yes, absolutely.

AF: Yeah, we do.

NA: Yeah, and I met Andrew and we were... well I don't think he had officially joined up so I don't think it counts.

AF: Yeah, it was outside of the club but coincidentally he had just recently joined but you'd not met him there. I don't think... It’d be nice to say we've had a marriage but we haven't yet! [Laughter] Maybe…!

RH: Who designed your club logo?

AF: The, erm, logo that we've got on the t-shirts, you mean the lettering?

NA: I think the owl?

AF: Oh the owl! The owl went back right to the beginning and Dom was involved as well, and the guy who actually designed the owl was a friend of someone who has never run with us, basically. It was a last-minute thing. We asked people to give ideas or give us… and Dom had put one in which we were going to go with, and then this one came in very last-minute, sorry Dom, and we ended up going with the other one.

DB: We had a poll going on on Facebook, didn’t we? [Unclear]

AF: It were yours and his, I think, and it was very last-minute. I don't even know the guy who did it. I know the guy who introduced me to him, Paul, but I don't know the guy’s name and he basically designed it.

RH: What does it look like?

AF: It's an owl, which is like representative of Leeds City Council, I think, the owl. And then we've got it in rainbow colours.

RH: What does your running kit look like?

NA: Actually good! We've got a new kit this year, which the committee kind of put together. I think because what we were very conscious is that up until that moment in time, we had so many versions of previous running shirts that people were turning up in…two. And basically, what we were kind of hoping for would be that there would be one shirt that our runners would wear when they were running races, or at Pride events and things like this. So we all looked, you know, like a team or more like a group and so we put one together that basically has our name across on the front in sort of bold letters and on the back with the owl. And the idea is that all members are now expected to wear that. We've invested so that basically now every member and every new member from this moment on will be given a vest upon joining so that basically we can all have a nice corporate look that looks the same.

MB: It's taken us a few years to get to this point. In the first few years, all the training for the Run Leaders, anything that we wanted, was funded by the original members. We couldn't get funding anywhere, no one was really interested in us. And even yet we still have no one who sponsors us, we do all of this out of money that we spend, or money that we've raised as a club. So we've just got to the point where we've actually managed to raise enough money over the years to be able to fund a proper club kit.

NA: And most of that, to be fair, is coming from membership fees. And now we're sort of looking at investing in other areas. We put together a strategic vision going in to help the club develop over a 3-year period, so there's lots of different facets to that but one particular that comes to mind is the website, which we're going to invest in to get a new website put together that basically does everything we need it to do.

RH: Besides the website, how do you sort of keep in touch with the various members?

AF: Social media, really. Facebook is a good one. We had a new guy join on Saturday and he’s not on Facebook so it relies on me then to maybe, if there's any last-minute change to plans, to message him basically. But yeah, every other member is on Facebook. We've got a Facebook members group now, which is a secret group so only the paid members actually join there. And as soon as a member pays the member’s fee and joins the club, they will be added to the Facebook members group. So we've got all the events out there, the invites to the socials, to the weekends away. And it's just a better way for us to communicate with members without… So we've got a public group as well, but there's things that we don't want to share with the public group or just general public. There's things we'd rather keep in just for members, so like members only pay the membership fee and are entitled to be invited to the club nights out and the weekends away, which isn't open to the general public.

NA: We think that's been quite a good thing for us as a club, in that people want, you know, they see us put pictures up on the Facebook public page of all the great things we do and people want to find out more, they want to know more, and the only way they can really know more is by signing up and becoming members and becoming part of that group. And as soon as we did put pictures up, there was quite a big surge of membership, following that.

AF: People seem to like the group. There was a bit of a kick-off when we took a couple of people out because of, at the end of the club year, it's a members group at the end of the day so if they don't pay a membership fee then they're no longer a member. It's an entitlement of being a member of that group. And we have got the public group which… we tend to share the weekly runs on there so people still know where we are and can come along. It’s just… We're just trying to gear it up to members really, and we've got Twitter and Instagram too.

MB: And also, because we're an England Athletics-registered club, members who choose to become England Athletics Registered Athletes all get allocated a specific number and they have access to an athletes’ portal and we can contact all our members over the portal as well.

RH: Dom, as someone who's been with the Frontrunners for quite a long time, what is it that keeps you coming back?

DB: For me it's always been more the social stuff first and then the running second. [Laughs] But I don't know. That was the main driver for me when I joined originally and it hasn't really changed [laughter] so I'm not a massively competitive person so yeah, I'm not particularly bothered about driving for a personal best or anything like that. But yeah, certainly the people that I've met and the socials etc. are a big draw.

RH: Perhaps actually, to finish off, can I carry on and go around the table and just tell me what's been the favourite aspect of being a member of the Frontrunners, or something from the club's history that you've really enjoyed taking part in?

AF: Erm, I think it's really good to be involved with the Pride, so like the Pride Park Run. It's really popular, like we put a tweet out the other week and we got lots of really nice comments saying it's their favourite Park Run of the year, which is very nice and we're actually voted by, I think it's the directors or the leadership team within the Woodhouse Moor Park Run, we were voted their favourite event of last year, which is really nice. And I think also for me, it's the friendships that I've made but it's also you can see other people forming friendships. So people who come from outside this city and join the club to make friends, perhaps, because they're on their own or part of a couple but there's no friends outside that pairing, and I think that's, for me is one of the nice things because I didn't really think that far forward when I started the club.

MB: For me, I joined the club so I would make new friends and I wanted to run 5k, and then when I ran 5k I wanted to run 10k, and then I wanted to run a half-marathon. My personal highlight was running the London Marathon and coming over the finish line in my Leeds Frontrunners t-shirt. And I think that now about everyone, so we've got a member who's currently training for three marathons in three days and, when she does that, her success will be our success, we will all celebrate that as if we'd all done it. And it's just really lovely having this group of people who are at completely different stages in their running but all wanting and working towards the same things.

NA: I think a large part of what I enjoy about Leeds Frontrunners is the fact that, running twice a week, you see more potentially of the people you run with than you do your own family. And there's a lovely community feel to that, in that, we, there's sort of a lot of camaraderie but there's also such a nice sense of people genuinely look out for each other. So sometimes we'll have conversations and go 'oh we haven't seen so-and-so in a couple of weeks, do we know if they're alright?' And we'll send them a message and, because there is a potential for people who have moved to new cities, or people maybe feeling isolated or feeling alone, and being an inclusive club I think we respond to that. Erm, Leeds City Council even went as far this year to fund two of the committee to go on a Mental Health First Aid course which has been really, really useful in terms of when we've had, sort of, people going through tough times, and being able to respond and help to that, you know, that's been a lovely part of the club.

RH: Thank you very much everyone. I hope you have a brilliant time at this year’s Pride.

[END]