OK, just get through this and there will only be 100 left to go…
That’s was my mindset as I sat in my warm parked car a few blocks from the start. It was chilly. It was snowing, all be it just light flurries. I’d been a bit sick lately with a cough that just wouldn’t go away. But the worst was the howling wind, reaching gusts of 35-40 MPH. I really didn’t feel up to it. But I was there and another city down was just a 5K away.
So with just two minutes until race time, I jumped out of my car and made it to the start/finish line, where I found 283 brave souls and probably just as many volunteers. And out on the streets of Winchester we went. About a mile in, I am pretty sure I was last, or at the very least the last person who was actually running more than half the time. By the last mile, I caught up with some other slow runners, or they dropped back to me. I finished with a lousy time, especially when you consider that it was a pretty flat course.
Even with his clunky colonial shoes, George Washington probably would have been much faster than me today. Washington spent some of his early years in the town as a surveyor. During the Civil War, Winchester was hotly contested and changed hands 72 times. The South’s Col. Stonewell Jackson and the North’s General Sheridan both had headquarters in the city. The South used it as a launching point for some of its major offensives.
Today, it has a population of about 25,000 and a median income of $35K. It hosts the Shenandoah Apple Blossom Festival in early May.
34 down, just 100 to go
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