SOCIAL MOVEMENT
Meet the Outrunners: the east London running club empowering youngsters to be their personal best
IF YOU WERE GOING TO START an inspirational running club anywhere in the UK, beside the London Stadium – scene of Mo Farah’s double gold in the 2012 Olympics – is a decent shout. Surrounding the world-class sporting venues in Elizabeth Park is a plethora of hip and colourful bars and cafes. So, it’s a great area to run through and enjoy a coffee or beer by the canal afterwards – if you can afford it. Not everyone can.
Newham, home to the legacy venues, is also home to a lot of deprivation.
Half the borough’s children live in poverty, versus a national average of 29%. There are also more than 100 languages spoken here, evidence of many cultures, not all of which find running readily accessible – which is where the Outrunners club comes in.
Seven years ago, TylerWilliams-Green was a local youth worker helping a couple of friends to prepare for the London Marathon. ‘I was doing a coaching course, so I needed two case studies,’ he says. ‘They then asked me to carry on coaching them individually.’
He offered to train them together. Meeting at a local pub, pretty soon more than a dozen people joined them.
As numbers grew, Williams-Green realised he had a club on his hands. Here, he took the big decision to make giving back to the community an obligatory feature of membership. ‘There are many running clubs where you can just turn up and run. They’re amazing places,’ says Williams-Green. ‘But I wouldn’t even put Outrunners in that running club bracket. We are a charity with full-time members of staff and about 40 volunteers.’
In the first half of 2023, the club worked with around 600 people. For kids, the focus is on fun and movement, with relays and scavenger hunts to promote teamwork. To reel in the teenagers, the emphasis is on making exercise a vibe: running with speakers and offering tempting merch. But hoodies and trainers can only be earned by completing the relevant course. There’s also a youth leadership course where 16-to 18-year-olds are encou
