Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Timirra Gaither. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Timirra , thanks for joining us today. Alright, so you had your idea and then what happened? Can you walk us through the story of how you went from just an idea to executing on the idea

Honestly, the execution was the easy part for me. In this case, the hardest part was committing to starting the run club in the first place. Once I fully committed to the idea, the first thing I did was reach out to my core friend group about the idea. I knew I could rely on them to be candidly honest about anything I was interested in doing. From the initial, “Hey, I’m thinking about starting a run club?”text, they were able to validate some of my reasons as to why I wanted to start Double Digit and give me some really good advice about where I should start.

After that, I pretty much mapped out all my next steps. 1st was figuring out an area in Dallas where there is a need for this type of community, Downtown was the easiest choice because it was centrally located and there were no run communities that ran in the inner city. There were a couple options where we couple meet downtown also. I ended up choosing Klyde Warren park because it is right off the interstate! 2nd was figuring out how I could get the word out. Luckily, I know other small business owners in Dallas that were able to report our initial flyer about our first run club meet up. I also utilized different facebook groups, and I also started to post about the run club on tik tok. Lastly, I had to commit to a date and time frame during the summer that wasn’t going to be absurdly hot. Luckily, by the time I had all the small details figured out, it was getting close to September of 2023. We ended up having our first run on a relatively mild day in Dallas, so that was super nice!

After all that, everything just seemed to fall in place!

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My name is Timirra, and I started Double Digit Run club in the summer of 2023. I started my run journey in January of 2023. The year before, I had just moved to Dallas. I was struggled to find my own community. As a person that struggles with their mental health, I figured a healthy distraction would be to find some type of hobby that I could use to get my mind off things. Running seemed like the easiest/cheapest route to go. Obviously, when you start anything you’re gonna be pretty bad. That was the case for me. Up until that point in time, I had not ran more than a mile since hight school. Over time though, I started to really see progress in my run journey. Around mid April, I started to get fed up with running by myself. I had heard about a couple run clubs in Dallas through social media, but I was pretty scared to go to one by myself. I ended up choosing one that was close to where I lived at the time. I did my research and noted that this run club was small but open to all paces. Unfortunately for me that did not include someone who, at the time, ran a 15 minute mile. I was left in the dust. That’s pretty much how this run community came about. I wanted to create a space for slow runners who want/desire to run in a group setting. Running is so much more fun when you have someone with you. It’s also a lot safer too! Double Digit is a 10:00+ pace friendly run club looking to bring together new and existing runners who simply don’t want to run alone anymore.

How did you build your audience on social media?

In this era of social media, you have to have some type of social presence when you have a small business. As someone deathly afraid of social media, this was somewhat of a learning curve for me. Having a younger sister certainly helped though! The easiest way I was able to build/reach an audience for my run club was simply positing consistently. There was a time where I was posting close to every single day about my own running journey and double digit’s run club meet ups. The easiest route for me was tik tok. People use it as a search engine all the time. Utilizing the hashtags were super essential in helping those looking for a run club in Dallas to find us! It still shocks me everyday when someone says they found us on social media. My advice to starting on social media is to not give a single care about what people may say if you start to post consistently. I still get stage fright when I’m recording myself in public, but I’ll do anything that will benefit the run club!

Contact Info:

• Instagram: Instagram.com/doubledigitrc