Beginners and Improvers

Our volunteer coaches organise courses aimed at beginners, novice runners and improvers. We run these courses 3 or 4 times a year depending on demand and availability.

Beginners Course

Our beginners running course is suitable for adults of all ages looking to start running.

Objectives:

At the end of the 8 weeks runners should be able to run continuously for 30 minutes and possibly to a distance of 7km.
Runners will learn the club “two parks” route and an alternative, shorter, route around Hyde Park to enable them to join the weekly club runs once the course has finished.

Our next beginners course will start on 10th January 2026. The courses are popular, if you have signed up in the past please contact beginners@serpentine.org.uk to be added to a waiting list for this course.

Duration: 8 weeks

When and Where: All our sessions are held in Hyde Park alongside our club runs.

Saturday mornings 9.25am. This is a coached session focusing on good running technique followed by an opportunity to catch up socially over a coffee in the park.
Wednesday evenings 7.00pm. This session is a led run focusing on building up the distance of continuous running with some walking as needed.

To get the best from the course, runners should be able to commit to running three times a week.

Cost: Free for club members. Membership is £45 a year, £20 for concessions.

You must be a current member of the club to sign up for the Beginners’ Course. To join the club, please click here, and then come back to this page to sign up for the course.

If you are a member of the club and you are reading this message, please make sure you have logged in to the website.

If you have any questions you can contact us at beginners@serpentine.org.uk

Improvers Programme

Our improvers programme is aimed at adults looking to extend their distance to run continuously for at least 10k or to improve their pace.

The programme is suitable for people moving on from our beginners course, anyone looking to run their first race. It is also suitable for new club members at foundation level looking for an introduction to club sessions to help them improve their running. If your target 10k time is faster than 48 minutes, this is probably not the group for you.

Objectives:

to improve running endurance to run continuously for 10k or further
to improve running pace
provide a next step for graduates from the beginners course
introduce a framework of existing club sessions to enable participants to improve

Our Next Improver Programme will be in Spring 2026

You can contact us at improvers@serpentine.org.uk

Here you can create a free account from which you can manage one or more athlete accounts. For example, for members under 16, please get a parent or guardian to register here, and then register the athlete from within the parent account. The details you enter here should be for the parent or manager, not for the athlete. If you are 16 or over, you can instead register your own stand-alone athlete account.

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Beginners Course

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