North End Runners share their favourite summer workout

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As part of a weekly workout series, we spoke to the North End Runners, a local run crew from Halifax, about their weekly club runs and workouts.

Canadian Running: Now that summer has arrived and temperatures are rising, what sort of group workouts do you do?

North End Runners: While we don’t do specific workouts in the summer, we do turn it up. When late-spring hits we start up #TUF workouts every Friday. TUF = throw up Friday. Each week, we get a different person from the crew to lead the run and it’s totally up to them to decide the workout. It gets our crew more involved.

Wednesday is crew night where we host an easy 6K run around the city. It’s a time to chill out and then socialize over a few beers. In the spring, summer and fall, we also add a Thursday night trail run, but quite informally. We call these our #NERTimberwolves runs and usually get added seasonally just like our #TUF workouts on Fridays.

CR: What do the TUF workouts usually look like?

NER: It is totally up to the crew leader to decide each week, we just ask that the run be kept between 30-45 minutes including a warm up and cool down. We’ve mixed it up with any number of workout types, usually speed work such as hill workouts, fartleks, mile repeats and shorter 400m interval workouts. We always meet at the same corner of the Halifax Common–a public park in Halifax–which is a nice, flat, uninterrupted 1500m loop in the middle of the city. Citadel Hill is also right next door for some convenient hill training.

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CR: What kind of runner comes out for your runs?

NER: Just like everything with our crew, we run for fun. Everyone can go at their own pace and have their own goals, but ultimately we just want to play outside and try and get a little faster. And we always go for a few brews afterward.

We call ourselves a “crew” instead of a club, since we don’t charge fees and just want people to show up and run. Fifty weeks a year, we have our Wednesday crew nights and welcome all people of every pace.