I know that running with a club is about running with a group with similar abilities than yourself. Tonight was our first run with the club - although I didn't expect to run extremely fast, I didn't exactly think that myself and Andy would end up in a group that ran approximately a minute and a half slower than our average pace on a 5 mile. We ended up running just less than 4 miles in 40 minutes. We didn't even break a sweat and we could quite easily have joined a faster group, but then again, they might have been too fast for us.
Afterwards the group leader said that we should go with a slightly faster group on Friday - apparently there will be a "mid" group between the group that we were in tonight and the one up from us which he thinks we should join until we feel comfortable to join the faster Wednesday group. We'll see how it goes :) Wednesdays could easily become a nice slow run between two hard days - myself and Andy tend to push each other when it is just the two of us - maybe we need a bit of slowing down :)
how was the social aspect, though? didja play nice with the other kids?
I am usually the opposite - I tend to always run with the faster groups in my group runs. Part of it is my competitive nature, the other part is just wanting to push myself. I then take it a bit easier on my individual runs.
P.S. I posted about this post over on my blog:
http://therunningguy.com/?p=23