Hello Oxford Tri Clubbers – Hope you’re surviving the mince pies and Christmas drinks! Don’t worry, not long now and hopefully Santa will bring you some amazing tri related gifts. New legs would be top of my wish list following 7 weeks of enjoying the ‘off-season’ a little too much. I need to get the bike back on the turbo…. Maybe January….
I digress… I write this message having just taken on the Chair role and while I don’t want to make this a particularly long message it is an important one.
Membership fees. Although we don’t have the final 2024 accounts yet it does look like we’ve had a good year and will likely show a modest surplus.
Obviously that’s a great headline but there is a bit of subtext I would like you to understand driving the committee decision. We have two main sources of income: Membership fees and Pre Blenheim Open Water Swim income. As it stands our membership fee income does not cover the costs of providing you with the sessions we put on despite cutting sessions and costs this year, there is was approximately a £5000 gap between income from memberships and our running costs, so to break even it’s essential we generate additional income from external events.
This year Craig has led the charge and managed to get us a connection at the organisers of the Blenheim Palace Tri, which got our Open Water Swim sessions into their event newsletter and consequently we fully sold out and had an amazingly successful set of swims in May developing the confidence of swimmers taking on the event and generating the income necessary to bridge the vast majority of the gap I mentioned above.
Of course in order to generate that income we had to rely on you to volunteer your help to run these events. You provided incredible support to run the Pre Blenheim Swims at Queenford lakes, additionally loads more people helped out at the Blenheim Triathlon and Oxford 1/2 and we put on a Mini Aquathlon all of which contributed to the club finances.
You did all this on top of the regular member duties of ‘land safety’ at the lake, ‘on water’ safety at the lake, coaching, committee roles, XC coordination, pre Blenheim swim support, parking duties and of course running social events. Honestly you’re amazing and I’m so proud to be part of this community. As a committee we don’t want that pressure of generating ‘external’ income driving our club planning and calendar. We want to focus on providing the best possible member experience for all, making sure you feel welcome and wanted in the club with few strings attached.
I absolutely want to continue exploring how to improve our diversity, inclusion and community strategies, we want to invest more in sessions, invest more in coaching to develop those we have and encourage new coaches to join us in being the best coaches in the country. We want to invest in Swim, Bike and Run leaders to expand our offering of ‘Led’ sessions, we’d love to see more ‘social’ sessions added to our calendar to help members meet and engage with each other, we’ve clearly got a lot in common in sport, but sometime a pool session isn’t the easiest way to get know people!! Costs are of course going up at our venues and so to keep us sustainable and progressing towards less reliance on external income to break even we have decided to raise membership fees from January 1st to £160 (£150 in 2024).
I can’t wait to talk to you more about our Members Evening at the Horspath Track on 30th January where we will have Britain’s Fastest Ever Ironman Triathlete, Kieran Lindars, leading the run session and then joining us in the clubhouse for a chat about his career to date. If you haven’t heard of Kieran, firstly he’s local!! He’s based in Aylesbury and announced himself on the pro scene in 2022 by winning the European long course championships at Challenge Almere. In 2023 he went back to defend his title but it nearly ended in disaster, he held on for second, but it wasn’t pretty, see how he crossed the line in the video below!!
Roll on 2024 where he had an amazing leap into the realms of triathlon superstardom at a wet and windy Ironman Frankfurt, recording the fastest ever Ironman time by a British athlete (7hrs 32mins) and coming second to Kristian Blumenfeldt, This earned him a slot in Kona 2024 where he proved his Frankfurt race was no fluke, 8th in the world champs and becoming the fastest ever Brit in Kona with a time 7hrs 52mins.
Let me know what questions you’d like to ask Kieran?
Any questions please feel free to mail chair@oxfordtri.co.uk or even better please speak to me, I will be coming to all OxfordTri venues at some point in January/February and would love to talk to you personally about anything, but especially about the club.
Happy Christmas
Sean