The Old Runner

It's an 80-mile drive from home, but I've always liked this race along the curvy and hilly roads along Lake Lure that begins at the Ingles Supermarket on the south side of the lake and finishes at the beach on Rumbling Bald Resort. The final stretch along the beach is fun and lined with cheering spectators, making it one of the best local race finishes. The post-race food is excellent, with lots of homemade goodies, but the best perk is the ice cream sundae bar where you can choose your ice cream and toppings, and they don't mind you coming back for seconds (I didn't try for thirds). There was one big disappointment after the race though. This year they completely skipped the awards ceremony for age group winners. There was a half-hearted attempt at an awards ceremony in that they gave an award to the 1st place overall male and female, but that was it, and quite a few runners were miffed that their age group awards were completely omitted from the post-race activities, ...

Since 2011, the American Legion World Series has been held in Shelby, and the 7th Inning Stretch Festival is held every year to celebrate the series. The official festival was canceled this year due to Covid but the 5k race went on as usual. It's a good one as far as local races go, and although a little smaller this year as are almost all races, it was still fun and the organizers did a good job as usual.  They gave you a choice between a regular T-shirt that was just okay looking and a really great running singlet, and I liked the singlet so much I switched shirts before the race and wore it while I was running. That's usually a no-no but it was easy to make an exception for this one. The Tokyo Olympics marathon for women was held on Friday night before this Saturday morning race and I was absolutely inspired by Molly Seidel, who in only her third marathon won the bronze medal, becoming only the third American woman to win a medal for the marathon. As I watched her running th...

It's been six years since I've run a race in my hometown of Hickory. When I first started running 13 years ago I sought out races in the Hickory area thinking I'd run into some old friends, but over the years I realized that wasn't going to happen, so now it seems I only run there if there's a race that I'm really interested in or if there are no races nearer to me. This weekend the Home Run Trot was the only race anywhere close so I headed for Hickory. It was good to see a few of my friends from the Charlotte/Gastonia area there, so we could hang out together both before and after the race. The race is held in the area surrounding the baseball field where the Hickory Crawdads minor league team plays and, as is the case with pretty much every race in this area, there aren't a lot of flat spots to run on. Seems like you're either going uphill or downhill the entire race. I wasn't exactly thrilled with my finish time of 25:41, but that seems to be the ...