News notes

I’m not the type to be overly impressed by running out through the tunnel onto the football field at the Big House.

After all, I was a member of the Junction City Tigers high school football team, which ran through a gauntlet of cheerleaders and band members onto the field on Friday nights.

Okay, it wasn’t exactly a gauntlet, and the band was only there  Homecoming week. But you get the drift. I did the high school version about 40 years ago.

Still, it was cool breaking into the light and onto the field at the University of Michigan’s stadium Sunday morning, along with thousands of others running in the Big House/Big Heart 10K.

I’ve run in a number of 10K races over the years, and I’ve enjoyed them all. This was different for me, however, and looking around me during the race I got the feeling I wasn’t alone in the sentiment.

I was running for fun, and for a cause. I didn’t care what my time was. If you know me, you know that’s a hard thing to say. I’m almost always competitive.

This race, however, was about raising money to fight heart disease, and about the fun of running into the Big House. The race was full of people who didn’t appear to be serious runners, or who weren’t running seriously this day.

My daughter, who ran with me Sunday, was a good example. She’s been training hard all summer to run the Detroit half-marathon in two weeks (a warmup to the full marathon next year). She could have beaten me by 10 minutes (I haven’t been training for anything).

But we ran a pleasant 6.2 miles together, chatting as we strode along the streets of Ann Arbor, through the UM campus and back to the stadium.

I wanted to save my energy for the sprint onto the field. I have never run in the Big House/Big Heart event before, but I knew what would happen when runners broke out of the tunnel.

The pace picked up as we entered the stadium. And when running shoes hit green carpet, the race was on. The adrenalin surge is amazing. Tired legs are forgotten as runners circled under the goal posts and sprinted for the 50-yard-line.

Of course, the stadium was nearly empty, except for a few hundred friends and family members. It’s not quite like on Saturday afternoon.

But it was still fun. And raising money to fight heart disease is personal for me. My father and grandfather died of heart attacks. I probably will, too.

But not before I cross one more thing off the bucket list. I ran through the tunnel and into one of the world’s great stadiums.

(If you’re interested in running the Big House/Big Heart next year, here’s the link to the Web site. And if 10K is too far, the 5K also finishes in the stadium.)

(By the way, everyone wasn’t just running for fun. The race was won by Ian Forsyth of Ann Arbor in a very respectable 31:19. That’s just a couple seconds over a 5-minute mile pace.)

This entry was posted on Monday, October 5th, 2009 at 9:41 am and is filed under Local issues, events, Running. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.