This morning, a crowd of about forty gathered at the East Aurora Cooperative Market to run the 2nd Annual Turk-EA Trot. Last year, we had seven runners. This year, we had more than 25! I was giddy with excitement!
The run began at 10 am, and familiar faces started wandering in shortly before. About half the group was made up of members of our local running group, and the rest were strangers to me. I was surprised at how many out-of-towners who were unrelated to others in the crowd showed up as well. We had runners, walkers and spectators.
In the weeks before the run, I had volunteers from our running group help make flyers, design the course and share our post on social media. A friend (who ended up winning the run this morning!) even ran the course beforehand to put out our direction signs.
Andrew stayed behind to keep time, and costumes were encouraged.
We had prizes for first male and female, best costumes and even for our youngest runner. I wanted the prizes to be kinda goofy and turkey-themed, so I picked up some Thanksgiving decorations at Dollar Tree and sweetened the deal with co-op giftcards and 42 North beer tokens for the runners. Too bad our first male was only 17! Peter Rifenburg finished in 22:38, just two seconds behind our own Ellen Brody, who was our overall winner and first female in 22:36. I came in about a minute later, in 23:46.
Growing the race has always been my plan, and I might need to look into getting us a little more ‘official’ next year. This year, there was no registration or fee (but we did ask for food donations and received TONS of food for our local food bank), and I was thrilled the co-op provided us with bananas post-race. I do want the run to remain relatively low-key, but I’d like to see it grow and understand that may need to include a budget, closed roads and t-shirts (yay!).
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