It’s hard to believe that it was six years ago that Bill and I joined our friend Lolly for the 2011 Ringing In Hope 10K in Brambleton, VA. We were the only Cruisers to run the race, but not the only in attendance because our Cruiser friend Jerome was working the event for Capital Running Company.

The race, originally held on New Year’s Eve and in Brambleton moved to Ashburn Farm last year to the same course as the Thanksgiving Day races. This year; however, it moved to One Loudoun and a tad earlier in the season on December 16th and was called Ringing In Hope: Jingle Bell Rock & Run. Ringing in Hope also holds a spring race on Memorial Day weekend called Ringing In Hope: A Salute To Our Troops which is also held at One Loudoun.

To learn a little more about Ringing In Hope, I visited their website and learned that:

RINGING IN HOPE™ promotes physical fitness and provides a festive environment for all to enjoy while making a difference in our own community. As an event management company, we are very proud to help shine a light on local charities and the essential services they offer.  Our running events are designed to provide a distinguished platform for charities to raise both awareness and financial support for their programs. RINGING IN HOPE™ is honored to bring charities and caring individuals together to give back to the community.

 

Some of the 2011 race charity beneficiaries included the Loudoun Habitat for Humanity, Loudoun Interfaith Relief, Make-A-Wish Foundation, and Jill’s House.

The Ringing In Hope 10K first came to my attention when my friend Lolly ran the inaugural race in 2010. She told me about how much she had enjoyed the race and how cool it had been having men dressed in tuxedos handing out hors d’oeuvres at the finish line. After minimal persuasion, Bill and I signed up for the race.

The race shirt was a basic long sleeved white cotton tee which I found in my race throwaway drawer where I keep shirts I plan on wearing on cold race mornings and throwing away just before the race starts. I keep my bibs and write the date, race name, my time, and place in my age group on the back so I still have almost all of my bibs. Cotton shirts, though, don’t make it into my closet and I was surprised that I still had it.

 

Race morning turned out gorgeous and slightly on the warm side for late December. The 2011 Ringing In Hope 10K was well attended and drew around 2,000 runners. Shortly before the race started I saw my friend Jess and we posed for a quick picture.

 

Once the race started was started by the Redskin Hogettes, Bill pulled ahead, but Lolly and I stayed together for the entire race which consisted of a combination of rolling hills mixed with flat segments through the Brambleton community. As runners of the 10K, we had to repeat the two-loop course which was kind of a bummer when we saw our 5K counterparts heading toward the finish line at our half-way point.

 

Bill finished before us with a time of 52:10 (8:24 pace) and 15th out of 49 in his age group.

As Lolly and I came in toward the finish line chute we saw Jerome to our left, waved…

And decided to stop for a quick high five before continuing toward the finish line…

As we turned to finish the race and cross the finish line, I almost tripped up Lolly, but we both finished upright with at time of 1:02:52 (10:07 pace), and for me, 18th out of 32 women in my age group.

Once finished, I turned to snap a quick picture of Jerome working the race.

 

Shortly after finding Bill we posed for our obligatory post-race photo.

 

We wandered around the finish line festivities for a few minutes before heading to the parking garage to get in our warm car. Having finished ten minutes before us, Bill was starting to get cold and wanted to leave, something all too familiar to me.

As I dug through my old photos preparing this throwback recap, I noticed that the lady in the bottom left of this picture is one of my MRTT friends, Susan, but we didn’t yet know each other at the time of this race.

 

The 2011 Ringing In Hope 10K was a fun race on New Year’s Eve. Since that weekend, I haven’t run a New Year’s related race until this year. It will be interesting to see what I think about a New Year’s Day race versus this New Year’s Eve race, putting aside the fact that I’m running a 5K this year versus a 10K in 2011.

 

  • Questions:
  • Have you run in one of the Ringing In Hope events?
  • Which would you rather run, a 5K or a 10K? ~ 5K for me! I’d rather push all out for 3.1 miles than pace myself to run hard for 6.2 miles.
  • Would you rather run a New Year’s Eve race or a New Year’s Day race? ~ New Year’s Eve for me unless there’s a really good bowl game on late on the night before New Year’s Eve that I  don’t want to miss.