The team that’s taking FP Movement even further.
At FP Movement, we’re all about moving together as a community, so when we met Liberty Track Club we knew we’d be fast friends. They built their very own community, born out of the desire to continue running at a high level — giving post-collegiate athletes a place to continue their running careers with the support of a team. Now sponsored by FP Movement, the Philadelphia-based running club trains together for marathons, 10Ks, track events and more — cheering each other on and pushing each member to run faster and further.
We sat down to chat with two of the founders, Carey Celata and Veronica Eder, and found out we have much more in common than just our Philly roots.
What inspired you to create Liberty Track Club?
Carey Celata: I feel like Veronica and I both had great team experiences in college. When we decided to keep running post-collegiately, we thought that the best way to challenge ourselves to get better was to be around people who were doing the same thing, so we could keep each other accountable. It’s easier to get out there with a team, and it’s fun to build something like that.
Veronica Eder: We wanted to create a club that had a strong team environment.
C: A cohesive training plan, racing plan — that kind of thing.
What is something that surprised you when starting Liberty Track Club?
V: A pleasant surprise was the FP Movement stuff!
C: That is for sure! But there are a lot of logistics – to grow from nothing to something we have to constantly be thinking about the next thing, and I feel like we have to have our foot on the gas to keep developing and need to be thinking ahead. I feel like if we pause we could fall behind.
V: Yes, and also just being mindful about who we add to keep the team mentality.
What are some of the things you look for in a new teammate?
C: We’re always going to prioritize members who want to participate in lots of different runs, who want to race and get better and enjoy a team atmosphere. It seems like a lot of the people who reach out are those who feel like they have unfinished business [with running] if they didn’t get to finish their college career (due to COVID), or they ran distance but want to keep pushing further and find they may have potential to run a marathon — everyone has ambitious goals which we really like.
Everyone in the club works full time or is a student — what are some of the challenges with juggling that schedule and competing at such a high level?
C: It’s obviously tough and people have to be flexible — maybe they have to push a workout out a day or run at a different time, but I think having a few days a week to come back together with a team is helpful. Maybe you run a few days alone, but then you meet up with the team — when you run alone I feel like it’s easier to push stuff off, but with the team, there’s more support to keep going.
V: Yeah, there’s definitely a lot of benefits to having the team mentality. With everyone being a pretty high-achiever, doing lots of different things, they’re pretty good at making sure running is still a priority even when life is crazy with work and family and friends and whatever else is going on.
C: We have teammates who are in medical school — I’m a nurse, Veronica works in marketing — we have teachers on the team. Everyone has multiple things that they’re passionate about, and I think that’s a big part of it. They’re passionate about getting better at running and passionate about their jobs, and with that intrinsic motivation, they’re able to make it work. There’s not a coach telling them they have to race this weekend, and there’s not anyone forcing them to go to practice — they’re here because they want to be here, and they want to make it work.
V: Most people have been running for a good portion of their lives, whether they started in high school, or in Carey’s case — Carey played squash beforehand— I just feel like sports have always been such a way for us to balance and be good at time management in a way, because it’s like ‘I have to get my run in, how am I going to prioritize everything else in my life so I can fit my run in too?’ So I feel like running post-collegiately has helped with that also — even though it’s busy and people have a lot going on. I feel like we have a lot of people who are on track to qualify for the Olympic trials, or they’re doing their first marathon, and they're gaining these new accomplishments so that keeps them going.
We sat down to chat with two of the founders, Carey Celata and Veronica Eder, and found out we have much more in common than just our Philly roots.
What inspired you to create Liberty Track Club?
Carey Celata: I feel like Veronica and I both had great team experiences in college. When we decided to keep running post-collegiately, we thought that the best way to challenge ourselves to get better was to be around people who were doing the same thing, so we could keep each other accountable. It’s easier to get out there with a team, and it’s fun to build something like that.
Veronica Eder: We wanted to create a club that had a strong team environment.
C: A cohesive training plan, racing plan — that kind of thing.
What is something that surprised you when starting Liberty Track Club?
V: A pleasant surprise was the FP Movement stuff!
C: That is for sure! But there are a lot of logistics – to grow from nothing to something we have to constantly be thinking about the next thing, and I feel like we have to have our foot on the gas to keep developing and need to be thinking ahead. I feel like if we pause we could fall behind.
V: Yes, and also just being mindful about who we add to keep the team mentality.
What are some of the things you look for in a new teammate?
C: We’re always going to prioritize members who want to participate in lots of different runs, who want to race and get better and enjoy a team atmosphere. It seems like a lot of the people who reach out are those who feel like they have unfinished business [with running] if they didn’t get to finish their college career (due to COVID), or they ran distance but want to keep pushing further and find they may have potential to run a marathon — everyone has ambitious goals which we really like.
Everyone in the club works full time or is a student — what are some of the challenges with juggling that schedule and competing at such a high level?
C: It’s obviously tough and people have to be flexible — maybe they have to push a workout out a day or run at a different time, but I think having a few days a week to come back together with a team is helpful. Maybe you run a few days alone, but then you meet up with the team — when you run alone I feel like it’s easier to push stuff off, but with the team, there’s more support to keep going.
V: Yeah, there’s definitely a lot of benefits to having the team mentality. With everyone being a pretty high-achiever, doing lots of different things, they’re pretty good at making sure running is still a priority even when life is crazy with work and family and friends and whatever else is going on.
C: We have teammates who are in medical school — I’m a nurse, Veronica works in marketing — we have teachers on the team. Everyone has multiple things that they’re passionate about, and I think that’s a big part of it. They’re passionate about getting better at running and passionate about their jobs, and with that intrinsic motivation, they’re able to make it work. There’s not a coach telling them they have to race this weekend, and there’s not anyone forcing them to go to practice — they’re here because they want to be here, and they want to make it work.
V: Most people have been running for a good portion of their lives, whether they started in high school, or in Carey’s case — Carey played squash beforehand— I just feel like sports have always been such a way for us to balance and be good at time management in a way, because it’s like ‘I have to get my run in, how am I going to prioritize everything else in my life so I can fit my run in too?’ So I feel like running post-collegiately has helped with that also — even though it’s busy and people have a lot going on. I feel like we have a lot of people who are on track to qualify for the Olympic trials, or they’re doing their first marathon, and they're gaining these new accomplishments so that keeps them going.
What is your go-to routine for a long run?
V: I have a very complicated coffee routine and that is the number one thing that has to be done before I go on a long run — it’s a whole process, pour-over, weighing — it’s intense. So I drink coffee, then I make white rice — it’s a weird combo but I do this before all my long workouts or long runs and then I’m normally all set. I also wake up an hour before, stretch and roll out so I’m loose and ready to go.
C: I always have oatmeal before a race. And I always wear the same pair of socks in a race.
V: We also always do a little shake-out the day before a race — which is a normal runner thing but might be abnormal for non-runners to hear, we do like a four-mile run to wake up the legs. And then there are other things — recovery gels, electrolytes.
Do you come up with the training plans yourself?
C: We’re still figuring coaching out, but the practice part is easy. Right now we have runs set for Tuesday night, Thursday morning at like 6am, and Sunday morning at 8am — that’s a long run. So, there are set things that we repeat, and we’ll always see people there. Then we have a group app that we use to plan other runs during the week, and there’s always a group meeting up to run in the mornings or the evenings every day. I’ll probably run with someone in the club every day this week because it’s easy to coordinate and everyone is running at some point in the day.
V: I’ll talk about the training plan — people will probably get a kick out of this. With the marathon training plan, some of us are running like 100 miles a week — we’re running like 18-20 mile runs, or doing 14-15 miles a day, whether that's a single run or a double run. Carey’s boyfriend, Matt, coaches a bunch of us, to segue more into the coaching stuff.
C: He’s coaching a few of the elites — I feel like when we started this club, we were pretty small, but now we have a few tiers. For the lower tiers, Veronica and I have made marathon training plans for some of our B and C-tier runners.
V: We’re trying to offer other benefits to the club, aside from just being on a team we also want people on the team to train together and work out together. A lot of people are training for the same races, or even if they’re not, they’re racing around the same time so they can follow very similar training plans. I think that was a downfall to some of the other clubs — everyone was doing different things, so it wasn’t a core training plan, a core race — you were just left scrambling trying to find someone to work out with.
How did you get started in running, and what does running mean to you?
C: My mom says I’ve been running forever — she says I wanted to run to preschool. She is a middle school cross-country coach. I was a squash player but ran track in the spring. I went to Penn for squash but ended up missing running and the team environment. I joined the track team at Penn and got a lot better and got excited about my potential — running PRs felt really rewarding— the process is fun and the outcome is cool. I got hooked on it and started running full-time during my junior year in college, and when I left college I felt like I had a lot left on the table, so I just wanted to keep going. I did for a while but I was training alone, so I was always looking for the team environment that I wanted.
V: I did gymnastics when I was younger which is very expensive, then my mom got a flier in the mail that was like $50 to join cross country, so she was like you’re doing this. I went in like 4th grade, and I didn’t like track because the longest event was a mile — which felt too short to me, a little psychopath, so after that, I just did cross country in the fall, but was eventually convinced to do track in the spring and now I’ve pretty much been doing it my entire life. I went to Auburn and ran, had some success there, and then ran for some running groups, but remotely. I ended up kind of hating running after that and stopped for a while — probably a year and a half or so which was the longest amount of time since I was 10 that I hadn’t been running — I did not run at all, which was really sad — so it was a weird time and I felt out of sorts. Eventually, I moved to Philly and met some of my future teammates and they were like you should come to this time trial, so I showed up to this mile time trial and ran like 5:03 and got my ass kicked, and realized I was out of shape so I just continued from there.
A lot of your members are local to the Philly area, so we’d love to know what it meant to you to work with FP Movement, which is also based in Philly.
C: FP Movement has been awesome, we love wearing their stuff. We’re a very Philly crowd, I would say — people love to hate on Philly, and we love to love it.
V: I feel like that’s one of the things that Carey and I talked about when we were first in talks with FP Movement because it was cool that we’re both based out of Philadelphia — which is pretty rare, as far as clothing companies go. I know Boston has New Balance, Adidas, and Tracksmith — so it’s really cool that Philly has something of its own.
C: Plus, it’s a little more unique and has made us more interesting. There are a lot of more generic brands out there, so it’s cool to have this unique situation of us both being based in Philly.
V: Philly is like an underdog mentality — with Philly fans it’s just like part of the culture, and so it’s just cool that FP Movement is up and coming, and now I see it everywhere, which is amazing.
C: Me too! I always take pictures of people when I see the buti!
V: And then Liberty Track Club — I wouldn’t say we started off as the underdog, but there are other clubs in the area that are more established and have backing from these big sponsors, but we have this unique relationship [with FP Movement] that I think has helped Liberty grow a lot.
What has been your favorite moment since starting Liberty Track Club? Any highlights personally or with the team that stand out?
C: I feel like in the late spring when I was running a few races, I had some people come up to me and say, “Oh yeah, I’ve heard of Liberty Track Club, that’s cool!” So that’s been really nice to start hearing. I think Philadelphia Distance Run weekend was really fun for the team because we’re a little bit bigger than when we started, and we had a bunch of people racing. In the fall I feel like there are a lot more races and more camaraderie because more people are running and racing, so it felt like a very exciting day for our team to be out there. A bunch of people just did a run during the race, then we had people in the half, and people in the 5k— it was probably the day we had the most people racing or engaged in the race, so that was cool.
V: I think my favorite weekend was the Penn Relays, Broad Street weekend — Philly events. We had a lot of people racing — two of our members were top ten finishers, which was great. The photo shoots we’ve had were amazing, and the Garden State Track Championship — we’ve had a couple of big weekends that have gone really well.
Where do you see Liberty Track Club in the next couple of years?
C: A big thing we would love to see is some Olympic trial qualifiers! It’s definitely a goal to be a high-placing team at some of the bigger races and to get on the map for people who don’t know about us yet. It’s exciting when friends go to bigger clubs like in New York, and people outside of Philly have heard of us, and they’re starting to know our name. We’d love to grow that recognition and become known as a go-to place for post-collegiates. There are a lot of collegiate runners who don’t go pro but don’t want to quit running, and there hasn’t been a space for that, so we’d like to be that space in Philadelphia.
V: The Philly running scene is good, but there’s still room for improvement, especially when you think of cities like Boston or New York — it’s cool for us to put Philly on the map, like maybe getting the Philly Marathon to be — maybe not a world stage contender, but to be a bigger event than it already is. Most of us are from the Philly area, so bringing recognition here is important to us. I would also love for us to put on our own races for post-collegiates in the future since there are not always a lot of opportunities to just race — and I’m just thinking that in a 10k track perspective — there were only like two 10ks for post-collegiates to enter last year, so we’d love to create more opportunities.
V: I have a very complicated coffee routine and that is the number one thing that has to be done before I go on a long run — it’s a whole process, pour-over, weighing — it’s intense. So I drink coffee, then I make white rice — it’s a weird combo but I do this before all my long workouts or long runs and then I’m normally all set. I also wake up an hour before, stretch and roll out so I’m loose and ready to go.
C: I always have oatmeal before a race. And I always wear the same pair of socks in a race.
V: We also always do a little shake-out the day before a race — which is a normal runner thing but might be abnormal for non-runners to hear, we do like a four-mile run to wake up the legs. And then there are other things — recovery gels, electrolytes.
Do you come up with the training plans yourself?
C: We’re still figuring coaching out, but the practice part is easy. Right now we have runs set for Tuesday night, Thursday morning at like 6am, and Sunday morning at 8am — that’s a long run. So, there are set things that we repeat, and we’ll always see people there. Then we have a group app that we use to plan other runs during the week, and there’s always a group meeting up to run in the mornings or the evenings every day. I’ll probably run with someone in the club every day this week because it’s easy to coordinate and everyone is running at some point in the day.
V: I’ll talk about the training plan — people will probably get a kick out of this. With the marathon training plan, some of us are running like 100 miles a week — we’re running like 18-20 mile runs, or doing 14-15 miles a day, whether that's a single run or a double run. Carey’s boyfriend, Matt, coaches a bunch of us, to segue more into the coaching stuff.
C: He’s coaching a few of the elites — I feel like when we started this club, we were pretty small, but now we have a few tiers. For the lower tiers, Veronica and I have made marathon training plans for some of our B and C-tier runners.
V: We’re trying to offer other benefits to the club, aside from just being on a team we also want people on the team to train together and work out together. A lot of people are training for the same races, or even if they’re not, they’re racing around the same time so they can follow very similar training plans. I think that was a downfall to some of the other clubs — everyone was doing different things, so it wasn’t a core training plan, a core race — you were just left scrambling trying to find someone to work out with.
How did you get started in running, and what does running mean to you?
C: My mom says I’ve been running forever — she says I wanted to run to preschool. She is a middle school cross-country coach. I was a squash player but ran track in the spring. I went to Penn for squash but ended up missing running and the team environment. I joined the track team at Penn and got a lot better and got excited about my potential — running PRs felt really rewarding— the process is fun and the outcome is cool. I got hooked on it and started running full-time during my junior year in college, and when I left college I felt like I had a lot left on the table, so I just wanted to keep going. I did for a while but I was training alone, so I was always looking for the team environment that I wanted.
V: I did gymnastics when I was younger which is very expensive, then my mom got a flier in the mail that was like $50 to join cross country, so she was like you’re doing this. I went in like 4th grade, and I didn’t like track because the longest event was a mile — which felt too short to me, a little psychopath, so after that, I just did cross country in the fall, but was eventually convinced to do track in the spring and now I’ve pretty much been doing it my entire life. I went to Auburn and ran, had some success there, and then ran for some running groups, but remotely. I ended up kind of hating running after that and stopped for a while — probably a year and a half or so which was the longest amount of time since I was 10 that I hadn’t been running — I did not run at all, which was really sad — so it was a weird time and I felt out of sorts. Eventually, I moved to Philly and met some of my future teammates and they were like you should come to this time trial, so I showed up to this mile time trial and ran like 5:03 and got my ass kicked, and realized I was out of shape so I just continued from there.
A lot of your members are local to the Philly area, so we’d love to know what it meant to you to work with FP Movement, which is also based in Philly.
C: FP Movement has been awesome, we love wearing their stuff. We’re a very Philly crowd, I would say — people love to hate on Philly, and we love to love it.
V: I feel like that’s one of the things that Carey and I talked about when we were first in talks with FP Movement because it was cool that we’re both based out of Philadelphia — which is pretty rare, as far as clothing companies go. I know Boston has New Balance, Adidas, and Tracksmith — so it’s really cool that Philly has something of its own.
C: Plus, it’s a little more unique and has made us more interesting. There are a lot of more generic brands out there, so it’s cool to have this unique situation of us both being based in Philly.
V: Philly is like an underdog mentality — with Philly fans it’s just like part of the culture, and so it’s just cool that FP Movement is up and coming, and now I see it everywhere, which is amazing.
C: Me too! I always take pictures of people when I see the buti!
V: And then Liberty Track Club — I wouldn’t say we started off as the underdog, but there are other clubs in the area that are more established and have backing from these big sponsors, but we have this unique relationship [with FP Movement] that I think has helped Liberty grow a lot.
What has been your favorite moment since starting Liberty Track Club? Any highlights personally or with the team that stand out?
C: I feel like in the late spring when I was running a few races, I had some people come up to me and say, “Oh yeah, I’ve heard of Liberty Track Club, that’s cool!” So that’s been really nice to start hearing. I think Philadelphia Distance Run weekend was really fun for the team because we’re a little bit bigger than when we started, and we had a bunch of people racing. In the fall I feel like there are a lot more races and more camaraderie because more people are running and racing, so it felt like a very exciting day for our team to be out there. A bunch of people just did a run during the race, then we had people in the half, and people in the 5k— it was probably the day we had the most people racing or engaged in the race, so that was cool.
V: I think my favorite weekend was the Penn Relays, Broad Street weekend — Philly events. We had a lot of people racing — two of our members were top ten finishers, which was great. The photo shoots we’ve had were amazing, and the Garden State Track Championship — we’ve had a couple of big weekends that have gone really well.
Where do you see Liberty Track Club in the next couple of years?
C: A big thing we would love to see is some Olympic trial qualifiers! It’s definitely a goal to be a high-placing team at some of the bigger races and to get on the map for people who don’t know about us yet. It’s exciting when friends go to bigger clubs like in New York, and people outside of Philly have heard of us, and they’re starting to know our name. We’d love to grow that recognition and become known as a go-to place for post-collegiates. There are a lot of collegiate runners who don’t go pro but don’t want to quit running, and there hasn’t been a space for that, so we’d like to be that space in Philadelphia.
V: The Philly running scene is good, but there’s still room for improvement, especially when you think of cities like Boston or New York — it’s cool for us to put Philly on the map, like maybe getting the Philly Marathon to be — maybe not a world stage contender, but to be a bigger event than it already is. Most of us are from the Philly area, so bringing recognition here is important to us. I would also love for us to put on our own races for post-collegiates in the future since there are not always a lot of opportunities to just race — and I’m just thinking that in a 10k track perspective — there were only like two 10ks for post-collegiates to enter last year, so we’d love to create more opportunities.
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