Sarah Vencil

Sarah started her running career later in life.  Never having done anything remotely athletic, she joined a training group with her friend to run the Monument Avenue 10k in 2004.  She realized that the greatest part of the whole event was not the race but the training. Each training run was a chance to go farther and the success of each week was exhilarating. Three years later she took on the task of running her first marathon. After five months of training, Sarah completed the 30th running of the Richmond Suntrust Marathon two days after her 40th birthday. Sarah's favorite event to date was the 2008 Shamrock 1/2 Marathon in Virginia Beach where she ran a personal best. Sarah continues to train and has completed the 2009 Walt Disney World Marathon, the 2010 Flying Pig Marathon in Cincinnati, and the 2010 Philadelphia Marathon where she PR’d.  Sarah has coached the Monument Avenue 10K novice teams for two years and has been employed as a running coach for Mom’s Treehouse in Richmond. Sarah is usually found in the back of the pack talking to people and trying to find her sense of humor about running!!  She loves hanging out with the newbie runners; the Moms and Dads that have taken a chance on themselves and put themselves out there to do something very brave. 

Sarah is a certified running coach through Road Runners Club of America.  She is a qualified and enthusiastic coach for people of all running abilities and all distances.  Her specialties are the couch potatoes and the runners looking to have the breakthrough runs that are life changing.  She utilizes many coaching tools that are designed to make training fun and pressure free. Sarah's true gift, however, is in talking with beginning runners who have never completed a race before and getting them to try running. Sarah believes that if you wonder if you can do it – you are already at the starting line, you just need the tools and support to get you there.

Sarah lives in Midlothian with her super supportive husband, business partner and co-coach, Todd and their son Dean who has several medals to show for his races.  When she is not training, coaching or volunteering at a race she can be seen at her son’s baseball games, on the road to see the Dave Matthews Band or cooking up a storm.

 

Todd Vencil

Todd Vencil loves running, has a lot of opinions, and likes to talk. As such, he finds coaching runners to be a particularly satisfying activity.

After an undistinguished high school athletic career and a thoroughly slack period in his late teens and early 20s, Todd started running again in the 1990s as an alternative to getting fat. He had three key realizations during this period that form much of the basis of his philosophy of running:

1) Running is hard.

2) Pace is often about ego.

3) There is a speed at which you can keep running; slow down until you find it.

Todd ran his first race as an adult – the Charlottesville Ten Miler – in 1999. He’s run that race twice, and has also run 5-Ks, 10-Ks, 15-Ks, ...a bunch of half marathons, and three marathons, including the Sun Trust Richmond Marathon and the Marine Corps Marathons. He is in a fit of enthusiasm, publicly committed himself to an Ironman triathlon; however, he has no bike, so that’s purely theoretical at this point.

He likes the half marathon best; it’s enough distance to keep you interested, but not enough for the training to take over your life. He runs marathons to have his life taken over once in a while.

Todd is slow, strictly a back-of-the-pack runner. Not only is he okay with that, he believes it means that his accomplishments are more impressive than those who happened to be born with the genes to be fast. This does not mean that he’s not always trying to get faster.

Todd became an RRCA-certified running coach in 2009. He has coached dozens of runners over the years, both with RunStrong since 2008 and for three seasons through Richmond’s well-known 10-k training program. He will coach pretty much anybody (or try to, whether they want coaching or not), but he has a special affinity for beginners and other back-of-the-packers. The ability to be fast is to some extent innate, but stamina is highly trainable, and Todd loves guiding people through that daunting process and watching them find their confidence as runners.

His favorite running quote is not a running quote at all. In 1962, speaking at Rice University, President John F. Kennedy said,

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

Todd runs, not because it is easy, but because it is hard (see #1, above), and because it serves to organize and measure the best of his energies and skills (like when the marathon takes over his life).

When he isn’t running, or working, or coaching runners, Todd hangs out with his wife Sarah and son Dean – not because it is hard, but because it is fun.