St. Charles Childrens Home 5k
There are plenty of local road races devoted to worthy causes but the St. Charles Children’s Home 5k race has got to be at the top of the list. The St. Charles Children Home in Rochester, founded in 1945 by the Grey Nuns of Canada was originally an orphanage and now serves as a group placement home under the direction of New Hampshire Catholic Charities for children from families in crisis. The home is staffed by Daughters of Mary, Mother of Healing Love. During the summer of 1996, the children’s running program at St. Charles was developed to help the children cope with the stress and anger accompanying placement and separation issues. The home’s philosophy is that running acts as a natural antidepressant and ultimately enables the enhancement of each child’s self esteem. The program has attracted national media attention, here is a short video link to a CBS Morning story on St. Charles back in 2006: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=2042470n&tag=related;photovideo
We’ve run 12 out of the 13 St. Charles races. The race was originally held at Spaulding High School in Rochester but due to the size of the field the race was moved to Pease International Tradeport. The last 6 or 7 years we’ve made it an unofficial mini-family reunion with my parents along with my sisters Anne and JJ, their husbands and eight children usually attending or running the race. Today we also had a number of Granite State Flash runners (Ben Platt, Ethan Platt, Jake Rowell, Brett Quinn) competing led by Justin (pictured above) and Jan Platt. Cathy ran a great race finishing 3rd overall in 18:34 despite running 22 miles Saturday. I do not recover from long runs nearly as fast as my better half as my quads were cooked from the start and I didn't even attempt to stay with her and finished in 19:00. My sister Anne looked very strong (see picture above) finishing 25:51 accompanied by my nephew William (to her left) who ran unofficially as he is competing in his first year running cross country for St. Thomas Aquinas in Dover. Last but not least was my nephew Jonathan Donovan, our Ethiopian speedster (in his basketball high tops) who took it out hard in the children’s race.
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