Open Athletics Manchester

Open athletics is an organisation for the promotion and development of Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transexual (LGBT) athletics in the broadest sense - including track and field, fell and trail running, and race walking.

We aim to be a forum and a network of individual LGBT athletes, groups and clubs across the UK - in Aberdeen, Brighton, Lancaster, London, Manchester, Midlands, North Wales, West Yorkshire.

Our broader objectives are to encourage open and active participation of the LGBT community in the sporting world and in the wider community and to remove homophobic barriers, contributing to individual sport development and to the development of communities through sport.

We welcome anybody who wants to join our forum - irrespective of their gender, sexual orientation, or athletic ability, who loves athletics or subscribes to our values.

The Open Athletics Group in Manchester emerged with the intention to open both the wide range of athletics disciplines to the LGBT community, and vice versa to open the LGBT community to the sporting world, participating in mainstream sport and the wider community.

We are not an athletics club! We are 'only' a small group of people training regularly, organising and taking part in a broad range of races - specially in the minority disciplines of track and field and fell running. *For LGBT distance running see Manchester FrontRunners.

Our Open Athletics group is mainly made of gay men and women and open to all - irrespective of gender, sexual orientation, or level of athletic ability. Specially, we welcome beginners and absolute beginners, those who want to get fit, women, those who like to have a go at Track and Field (T&F) and Fell running, or who may have done T&F in the past but have not done so for a bit ...

We support the objectives of Pride Sports and take part in the Annual Pride Games taking place in Manchester.

Training

We organise the following training sessions but if you cannot come to our sessions and would like some advice get in touch with us. We can assist with coaching, mentoring and training programmes. See also our training resources.

All sessions cater for all levels of ability!!

For Schedule, see:

http://www.openathletics.org/index.php?page=training

Contact:

co-chairs@openathletics.org