Deer Dash!!!
Sara and I ran in a 5K race this Saturday in my grandparents' town - Monticello, GA (also the home of country music star and my long-ago babysitter - no joke - Trisha Yearwood). My mom and sister also ran, and the four of us had to get up at six in the morning to get to the town square in time to register. The race didn't start until eight AM. They gave us t-shirts that had a deer tail shaped into the Nike swoosh logo and below this it said "Just doe it." They could so get sued.
A 5K is just over three miles (3.107 to be exact). However, in Monticello it feels more like ten miles because of all the hills. The race starts in the town square, right in front of the courthouse, then moves on through a graveyard (creepy!), through someone's backyard (odd...), through several neighborhoods, and back to the square. Around the two mile point is where you hit all the hills, and there's one on Persons St. that is steep as hell and almost half a mile long. That's where most people stopped running and started walking.
I actually did pretty well. Out of about 200 people I came in 81st, and 5th in my age/gender group, with a total time of 29:23. Sara came in at 33:53 (6th in her age/gender group), and my mom and sister (Jan and Carra Hughes) came in with her. My mom actually won third place in her age/gender group and received a coffee mug proclaiming so. If you'd care to see the standings - I don't see why you would - just follow this link. The dude who won wins every year - he finished in about fifteen and a half minutes.
The Deer Dash is part of an annual Monticello festival called... wait for it... the Deer Festival. For those of you from a Southern small town, it's like any other annual small town festival, such as the Rattlesnake Roundup or the Watermelon Festival. For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, watch the movie Waiting for Guffman and pay particular attention to their sesquicentennial festivities - the Deer Festival is exactly like that. Barefoot kids, old men with pot bellies and long beards, plump women looking at quilts, smells of BBQ and boiled peanuts - the Deer Festival has it all. It also had an old guy singing songs on a stage set up by the courthouse, and at one point he was doing a warbling rendition of "From a Distance." I think he hit the brown note a few times in there, too.
After we ran, Sara and I pigged out on boiled peanuts, turkey legs, and grilled corn on the cob, and we ate these under a tree in the town square. We've never felt more Southern.
posted by Scooter @ 9:05 AM
3 Comments:
Scooch-
I love this post. Especially the end. You really painted a picture of the Southern culture, and while it's kind of a laughable "culture" to some people, reading this really makes me miss it. i can't wait to come home.
In Waycross, we had the "Swamp Run". Man, y'all had really good times. You finished under 30 minutes. That's amazing. Congratulations. Conga, tu Latinos.
If you think 30 minutes is amazing, you should've seen the guy who won. Fifteen and a half minutes, for crying out loud!
My dad was at the starting line. He said that he watched us all run off, went to get himself a cup of coffee, then went to the finish line, and the guy was already done.
Sara and I are planning to run in a race in Thomson, called the Depot Dash, on Dec. 2 (I think, it might be the 3rd). You should join in if you're available, although you probably have finals around that time.
See, reading these kind of things makes me the saddest (well, a bittersweet kind of sad) mostly because it makes me miss papa, and going to stay at the Thomas house when the Pirkle family would come visit waycross. I miss you guys.
Post a Comment
<< Home