For the Grand Valley State University Running Club, winning isn’t the only thing on its minds as it continues its first season as a member of the National Intercollegiate Running Club Association.

GVSU will make its debut in the Spring Track Road Championships this Saturday in Bloomington, Ind.

The goal of NIRCA is to “promote the sport of competitive running for students at the collegiate club level”.

“It’s pretty important,” said club president Kevin Hausfeld. “This is our first year as part of the organization. We’re looking to go out there and have a good time. We’re having seven people go from the club, six of the seven are doing the half marathon, which is the road portion of the meet, and one person is running the 800-meter run.”

A half marathon run consists of 13.1 miles.

GVSU currently has between 30 to 40 active members in the running club. Only a portion of the team is going to the meet this year, so the team will look to beat their own personal times.

“We’re hoping to have a good showing,” said junior officer Zach Weber. “The goal is to just have fast times for each of us. Just show others that next year we will be people to contend with.”

The runners taking part in the meet have been putting in extra time to prepare. With this being the first NIRCA meet of the winter semester for GVSU, one of the main things they are looking for is to gain experience.

“We have been training a little bit longer than usual,” said junior officer Sarah Drevon. “We’ve been getting in some long runs. We’re just looking to go for personal times, rather than win as a team and see how everything works out. We have never done this before, so we’re kind of just feeling it out.”

The running club at GVSU allows for all skill levels to join, whether it is the serious runner who trains every day, or someone just looking to join as a beginner.The club is open to anyone interested in running.

”We have people that are super competitive that can run 16-minute 5K’s,” Weber said. “Then we have people that just run two or three times a week for fun. It just depends on who you are, but we cater to both the competitive and the social runner. We have competitive practices where people run really fast, and we have social runs as well.”

Currently, the club has an equal amount of competitive runners to recreational runners. At the start of the year, 60 people were involved in the club, but that number has fallen off a little.

The club doesn’t have any requirements in order to join.

“We don’t have any requirement for pace or anything,” Weber said. “We have groups that run together in the same pace. You usually run with people in the same level in the club.”

The next event for the GVSU running club will be the Wheel Run, which will take place on April 14.

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