Among the 4,000 runners who participated in this 5k was the team of the Universitat de València ‘UVSustainability Runners', which closed its first participation with very good feelings and with a great motivation to continue improving in the next races.
The 8th edition of the race ‘‘Never Stop Running. Never give up’’ took place on Sunday 12 February. This is the first popular race in which UVSustainability Runners participated as a group of the Universitat de València, in the framework of the Healthy University Programme of the UV. The 5K started at 9:00 a.m. in the morning in the Avenida Francia and ran along the seafront of València.
In the team classification UVSustainability Runners finished in 95th position, “it is a great place considering that there are more than 700 registered teams; but in the end our goal is not to win races but to acquire healthy habits and improve health and quality of life”, explains UVSustainability Runners coach Pablo Jiménez Jiménez (Department of Physical Education and Sports).
A total of 16 members of the UV participated in this race: Joaquín Galiana (Department of Research Methods and Diagnosis in Education), Elena Viqueira (Libraries and Documentation Service), José Manuel Pastor (Dept. Economic Analysis), Ascensión Doñate (Polibenestar), Ramón Llopis (Dept. Sociology and Social Anthropology), Roc Ros (Dept. Plant Biology), María Cebrián (Dept. Physiology), María José Gimeno (Libraries and Documentation Service), Yamileth Hernández (Research Management Service), Rosa Rutea (International Relations and Cooperation Service), Mireia Coscollà (Institute for Integrative Systems Biology), Diego Ramírez Muñoz (Dept. Electronic Engineering), José Ignacio Valenzuela Ríos (Dept. Botany and Geology), Vicente Cerverón Lleó (Dept. Computer Science), Jordi Muñoz Mari (Dept. Electronic Engineering) and Ricardo Ferris Castell (Dept. Computer Science).
The UVSustainability Runners group is formed by staff from different groups of the UV (PAS, PDI, PIF), who joined the team with the aim of taking up running and improve their health and quality of life. Team members know how important sporting activity is for maintaining good mental and physical health; unfortunately, in some situations work and family pressures can limit the time we can devote to taking care of our health. For this reason, the Office of the Vice-Principal for Sustainability, Cooperation and Healthy Life, together with the Sports Service, launched this initiative aimed at exposing and facilitating the practice of healthy physical activity to its staff.
“So far we have been focusing on getting them started in running in the right way, instilling good practices such as warming up before starting to train, learning to regulate the intensity, hydrating during practice, breathing correctly and doing exercises to make a correct return to calm”, adds the coach.
“We have only been training for a very short time, we started in January and they have improved a lot”, says Pablo Jiménez. “The main objective throughout the season is that everyone is encouraged to participate in the races, my intention as a coach is to give them the preparation they need so that they dare to try, whether it is in the competitive or non-competitive modality, the important thing is to participate and acquire healthy lifestyle habits”, says the professor of the Faculty of Physical Activity and Sport Sciences.
The next race in which UVSustainability Runners will participate will be the ‘Solidarity Race: Anem més enllà’, to be held on 25 March in Alboraia. “The team of runners faces this new event with great motivation, they finished last Sunday's race with a great taste in their mouths, many of them did not believe they were capable of completing the 5 km running and they did it, so in the next race they will be more physically and mentally prepared, and they will surely have even more fun”, concludes Pablo Jiménez.
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