02 December 2010

runbritain is pleased to announce that, supported by Sport England and in partnership with parkrun, Run in England, London Marathon, RunBristol (10k and half marathon), Reading Half Marathon, Swansea Bay 10k and Birmingham Half Marathon, the first ever Sports Hub for road running went live on Facebook yesterday (1 December).

The project, which links the news from runbritain and the events that will be hosting runbritain Grand Prix or UK Championship events in 2011, is the third such venture across all sports initiated by Sport England. It has been launched within seven weeks of the member organisations’ first meeting and is intended to aggregate road running information chronologically through the racing year as each event’s opening and closing dates approach but also by progression through the sport from first steps in a Run in England group.

“The idea is that this represents a one-stop source of information to runners of all standards on Facebook,” said runbritain MD, Geoff Wightman. “The network effect should exceed the sum and impact of the constituent parts and draw people into running, racing and into visiting everyone’s individual websites for additional information. We had a very successful link with Facebook through the autumn, which Sport England also arranged for us. It took runbritain’s Facebook fan numbers from 400 to almost 4,000 in just a few weeks. If this beds down strongly in the first half of 2011, I would hope we can add a number of other races and road running programmes by this time next year.”

Louise Griew, Head of Client Management at Sport England commented: “This project sees an unprecedented level of partnership working with the races coming together not just to offer something to those more elite runners who will do well out of the Grand Prix rankings but also something to the grassroots of running. It will provide access to new opportunities not just to those who race but also those who wish to get into running, no matter what level. We’ll be presenting running in a light never seen before on Facebook and it should make finding opportunities to run in your area easier than ever before.”

The address for the new Road Running Hub is: www.facebook.com/runbritain