Every year on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend I get a little homesick for Southern Wisconsin. Wait, "a little" might be a slight understatement. Each year the Whalen Clan gathers for Reuben's Run, a small 5k race that raises funds to supports an alcohol-free post Prom for a rural high school in Albany, Wisconsin. Although I haven't been able to run it in over 15 years, it never gets easier to miss. Each year, many members of my family gather to run the out-and-back 5k on the rolling hills of Green County. Every year, more and more Whalens and Whalen-friends join the team Whalen's Grocery named after the general store my grandfather and his parents once owned in the center of town. I think if you asked any of the runners to describe this fabulous race, they would probably laugh and ask you which race you were referring to. As far as races, it lacks the fabulous tech t-shirts, bonus bags, post-race dance party and beer tent. But what it lacks in giveaways, it makes up in tradition and heart. This is why I was feeling so blue Saturday morning at 8:30 am CST.
Reuben's Run may be where my love for the running was born. I probably wasn't even 10-years-old when I ran my first Reuben's, and I ran every year until my junior year of college. Every year my aunt Mary would pick my siblings and me up before the sun was up, pile us into her blue Cadillac, one that included automatic locks and windows, and encourage us to the starting line. My older, very cool cousins would always appear, sometime after the race director started the race, hoping no one else had entered their age bracket. The race was never about how fast you could run but whether or not you could run faster than that person who just might be in your age group. Collecting hardware as a Whalen was far outweighed the race t-shirt donning a scary picture of a guy named Reuben.
Who is Reuben? I am going to have to answer this question based on my childhood memory, as my recent research on Reuben was tremendously disappointing. I believe the legend goes that Reuben was an infamous citizen on Albany who lived long ago in a caves along the Sugar River and hunted deer with his bare hands. My Grandma Ruth and cousins used to scare my twin sister and me with stories of Reuben's ghost. I imagine these stories always made me run a little bit faster.
I would like to congratulate Reuben's Run on turning 30 this year and once again ruining a perfectly lovely first day of my Memorial Day Weekend. Reuben's Run, like so many small town races, isn't about the speed, the course, or even the hardware. It is about sharing a run with the ones you love.
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