The first Saturday is the only one that matters

A new runner makes up their mind about your club before the first kilometer marker. We can see it in the check-ins: of the people who come back for a second run, 84% are still coming three months later. Of the people who do not, almost none ever return. The whole question of whether a club grows is the question of the second Saturday, and the second Saturday is decided on the first.

I led runs in Baltimore for nine years before I joined Pacer, and I got this wrong for most of them. Here is what I would do from the start.

The fear is not the distance

Ask a first-timer afterward what they were worried about and it is never the running. It is arriving. Where exactly is the meeting point? Will I recognize anyone? Will I be the slowest? Is there a group for me, or will I be holding everyone up?

Every one of those can be answered before they leave the house:

• The pin. Not the park, the bench. "Harbor Steps, by the blue bollards" gets someone to the right spot. "The waterfront" gets them wandering.
• The pace groups, with real numbers. "All paces welcome" tells a nervous runner nothing. "Group C runs 6:15 a kilometer and walks the hill" tells them they belong.
• A name. The lead of their group, so there is one person to look for.

Know they are coming

The single most useful thing a lead can know on a Saturday morning is which names on the list are new. When a first-timer says yes, their group's lead hears about it. That lead's whole job at the start is to find that person in the first two minutes and say their name.

Being greeted by name by a stranger at 6:50 in the morning is the most welcome a person can feel. It takes one notification and ten seconds.

Put them in the right group, then stay with them

New runners nearly always pick a group that is too fast, because the slow group sounds like an admission. A lead who says "start with C today and move up next week if it's easy" has just given them a reason to come back next week.

And the sweeper stays behind them, whatever happens. A first-timer who finishes with someone beside them has had a good run, however slow it was. A first-timer who watches the group disappear around a corner has had their last one.

The ten minutes after

Do not let them leave straight from the finish. Walk them to the coffee, or just keep talking for two minutes. Ask what they thought of the route. Tell them what next Saturday's is. People return to places where someone noticed they were there.

Tuesday

The clubs with the best return rates do one more thing, and it is tiny. On the Tuesday after, the lead sends the first-timer one line: good to have you on Saturday, the next one is the canal loop. Not a newsletter, not a survey. One line from a person. The recap lists the first-timers so nobody has to remember who they were.

That is the whole method. A pin, a pace, a name, a sweeper and a sentence on Tuesday. None of it is hard. All of it is easy to forget on a morning when forty people are milling around and the cones are still in the car.