An event created by women and for women, the Heart & Sole Five Miler donates a portion of its proceeds to help fight heart disease, the number one killer of women.
So I did an all-women five mile race this morning. The start got delayed for a while as a thunderstorm moved through, but then thanks to the rain, it was mercifully cooler than it otherwise might have been. I do this race annually, and one year it was so hot, I grabbed cups of water from the uniformed, beret wearing Girl Scouts who were kindly dispensing them, and just threw the contents at my face and neck. Unfortunately, the water bounced off and doused the Girl Scouts, which I still feel sort of guilty about.
The bad a.m. weather kept some folks at home, but the turn out was still good and the event was really fun. Columbia SC is a small enough town that I can go just about anywhere and see people I know, and this race was no exception – friends, co-workers, neighbors, and students were all abundantly present. It’s one of the very nice aspects of living here. The racial composition of Columbia is about half white, half African American, with small but growing Latino and Asian populations, and even after living here for six years, I’m always happy to notice how easily and effortlessly integrated we can be as a community. Goodness knows we have our social and political problems, and the Republican-majority voters manage to elect some real idiots, but there are so many good people here that I still have a lot of hope for the future. It’s also why I get so pissed off at Northern “liberals” who write all white South Carolinians off as “crackers,” and ignore the sizable African American population here altogether.
At the start, local news anchor Dawndy Mercer bemoaned the fact that the humidity would give us all “flat hair.” I hadn’t even bothered to shower beforehand, so I wasn’t really worried about it, but of course I am not a television personality. She lead the (obligatory in South Carolina at the start of virtually every public event except possibly the Atheists’ Convention, if there ever actually was one) prayer, and also gave us a pep talk about getting and staying healthy (yay), which in part she linked to staying or becoming thin (boo). One interesting thing about races is that you can’t help noticing that some rather imperfect appearing bodies move very quickly, while some gorgeous by conventional standards folks have to drop it down to a walk at the very first hill.
The race organizers collected running or walking shoes for charity at the packet pick-up tables. I watched a few people rustle through the bins of “gently used” sneakers to find footwear for themselves with which to undertake the race, which was kind of sobering. Finlay Park, where the race started and finished, hosts a lot of homeless people on an everyday basis, and many of the them cheered for us racers and swigged at complimentary sports drinks and bottles of water. They also had access to the mountains of free, donated food at the end – fruit, danish, muffins, bagels and cream cheese, and chocolate covered strawberries. Hopefully they knew enough to avoid the Tab Energy drink, which tasted like bathroom cleanser. They were only homeless after all, not criminals!
Among the scores of women in attendance who move faster than I do, I got beaten by a rather extraordinary woman who was exactly twice my age. At first I thought, “I hope I am in her kind of physical condition when I am eighty-four years old,” and then it occurred to me that I am not even in as good a shape as she is NOW. She still competes in triathalons.
The neatest part of the race, and how this post got its name, was the active presence of large groups of girls in pink tee shirts, who competed as part of their “Girls On The Run” program. There was great enthusiasm and a lot of wonderful preteen sisterhood on display. One of my eleven year old neighbors very proudly informed me at the finish line that she had run eleven minute miles! Very cool. Now, all I need to do is to convince the race organizers, who blare a lot of up-tempo rock and hip hop songs along the route to keep racers motivated, to play some women artists for a change, and the event would be practically perfect.
–Ann Bartow
