PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Runners hit the pavement Sunday morning for the Philadelphia Distance Run, the first organized race in the city since the COVID-19 pandemic shut in-person races down.
Natalie Frank of New York City used the Philadelphia Distance Run as a training ground for some of the marathons she plans to run in the fall. She said getting out among people to run an organized race is exhilarating.
"[It's] a good tuneup race too for fall marathoners — New York City, Boston, Chicago, A lot of people are probably training for those races, using this as a tuneup," she said. "It's nice to get back after COVID after a long time off."
Ryan Callahan is co-founder of the new Philadelphia Distance Run, but as he explained, it had been around since 1978.
"Back in 2009, the Philadelphia Distance Run was replaced by the Rock 'n' Roll Half-Marathon. Rock 'n' Roll ran a great half-marathon here for about a decade," he said.
"In the last year, due to the pandemic, Rock 'n' Roll decided not to come back to Philadelphia, and now the Philadelphia Distance Run has returned."
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And the revived run conjures up great memories for Philadelphia runner Maureen Farrell. "It is so awesome. I ran it like 20 years ago and I'm coming back again," she shared.
But Callahan pointed out even though races are slowly resuming, COVID-19 isn't over.
"Operationally, you know you've gotta add in extra stuff," he said. "Got to give people more space. We have more corrals than normal, we have things more spread out than normal, and then the logistics of it all. Is the event going to happen? Is it not going to happen? Working really closely with the city and the public health department."
Runner Chris Wiegand of Abington says some of the COVID-19 precautions for this race reminded him that we are still in the middle of a pandemic.
"Wearing masks, getting negative COVID tests. Vaccine verification," he said.
And Callahan said that's also why race numbers are down. About 3,000 runners participated in this race, due in part to self-imposed caps.
"We don't want to have a 15,000-person race right now," he said. "We do someday, so we kind of control the numbers a little bit and also runners are still getting used to getting off of the sidelines and getting back into racing."
For Frank though, this moment has been a long time coming.
"I trained for three marathons that I couldn't do during COVID," he said, "so it's nice to be back out."
