Monthly Women’s Column - June, 2012
I am a runner.
Fundamentally running is an individual sport. It’s up to you to put one foot in front of the other and run. Despite this, I enjoy running with other people and so that’s how I ended up finding the San Francisco FrontRunners by the Stow Lake Boathouse one Saturday morning last year.
We have different reasons for joining running clubs. For me, I came looking for a community, which I initially discovered back in Long Beach, CA. I am a former Shoreline FrontRunner. We would meet up along the bluffs overlooking the beach. Our runs were along the concrete “boardwalk” that hugged the shoreline of the LBC. The membership at the time was mostly gay men and a handful of lesbians or bisexual women.
What I love about the FrontRunners is that I always feel welcome, but the one thing that I always found interesting was that there weren’t that many women members. This was an issue that the Shoreline FrontRunners collectively tackled. Everyone would pitch in to find ways to bring more women runners to the club. It’s clear that this is also an issue here in San Francisco. The one thing that sets SFFR apart and made me feel so welcome was meeting Darlene Hall, the Women’s Outreach Contact.
As we go into Pride month, I can’t help, but think how far we’ve come since the Stonewall Riots in June of 1969. We’ve achieved so much since then and we did this collectively as the LGBT community. We needed all hands on deck to make things happen then and we need to do that now as well.
We are losing an incredible Women’s Outreach Contact in Darlene Hall and so it’s important that we work together to find ways to bring more Queer women to FrontRunners. Our community is stronger when we all pitch in. If your place of employment, school or business has a LGBT organization, invite some of the women to the next Monthly Women’s Run, which will be the first Saturday of every month. That’s what I’m going to do.
I want to thank Darlene for all her hard work over the last four years in proactively working to bring more women to the SFFR.
I’m going to miss the runs in June because everyone I know seems to want to get married then. So I’ll see you all again at the July run!
Semper Fi and keep running!
Jules Tohn
