Paul and Renee Rakitin hope to develop programs for children, teens
By Staff Report
Renee and Paul Rakitin with their children, Demitri, 2, and Solstice, 4.
While Paul Rakitin was serving as a combat medic in the U.S. Army in Afghanistan, he dreamed of returning to Morgan Hill to open up a store with his wife Renee Rakitin specializing in running gear for people who wanted to get fit. Next month, his dream comes true with the grand opening of The Running Shop in Morgan Hill’s Plaza Shopping Center.
“My wife and I were talking about this for a long time, before I even left for Afghanistan,” Rakitin said. “I was gone for two years. The entire deployment in Afghanistan was 12 months. After I got back from that, I really wanted to focus on getting something like this running store established — working for myself, working for my family, the independence to give me a nice sense of freedom.”
Rakitin was an athlete growing up, playing soccer and running track and cross country. He also played football and wrestled.
As a student at Sacramento State, he kept running, competing in marathons and half marathons. “I qualified for the Boston Marathon – but I never went out there because I was too cheap to fly there,” he said with a laugh.
His passion for running and overall fitness developed into a career. In his 20s, he got a job as the manager of a gym in Monterey and learned business and customer service skills. Later, he worked as the manager of a running store.
“I like servicing people and helping them,” he said. “I liked them feeding off my enthusiasm for what my passion was, and in turn they became passionate about running and fitness as well. And I really enjoyed getting that feedback when they came back into the store and they said, ‘Paul, I love that shoe you suggested or that product or that nutrition bar, it really helped me get through that 5K or 10K run.’ That meant the world to me.”
The Running Shop specializes in providing customers with individual attention to their running, walking and hiking needs, Rakitin said. The store sells shoes, running apparel, and nutrition products. It will host women’s-only nights where women athletes and runners can get special attention including getting fitted for sports bras to give them the support they need to feel comfortable when running or working out.
Rakitin wants The Running Shop to be a place where he can educate beginning runners and other customers on how to get the most value for their money in running gear and apparel. In time, he intends to develop programs to help children and teenagers learn to run in a safe way to minimize the chance of injury.
“I’m not looking for the elite 10K or half-marathon runner,” Rakitin said. “They’ve been running their whole lives, they know what they’re going to use, and they know where they’re going to find it. They’re not my market. My market is the high school kid who’s nervous about running cross country for the first time and doesn’t really know where to begin. Or the middle-aged man or woman who want to lose some weight because they’re having health concerns such as the onset of Type 2 diabetes and they want to start walking.”
The Running Shop will be a non-intimidating and friendly place for customers, he said. “A lot of people don’t like to go into specialty shops because there’s often an ego by the staff,” he said. “I want to be able to have a comfortable environment where even the newbie runner finds an inviting, nurturing place to help get them up to speed on their running program or to build a new passion.”
THE RUNNING SHOP INFO:
Location: 16999 Monterey Road, Suite D
Open: In August 2013
Call: (650) 576-7466
Visit: www.runmorganhill.com
