Stories indexed with the term ‘5K run’

Editor’s note: The monthly milestone column, which appears on the second day of each month – the anniversary of The Ann Arbor Chronicle’s launch – is an opportunity for either the publisher or the editor of The Chronicle to touch base with readers on topics related to this publication.

It’s also a time that we highlight, with gratitude, our local advertisers, and ask readers to consider subscribing voluntarily to The Chronicle to support our work.

I’d like to begin this month’s milestone column by sharing some good news about one of The Chronicle’s writers – Jennifer Coffman, who covers the Ann Arbor Public Schools board of education for us. Last week she gave birth to a baby girl: Eleanor Olivia Coffman. So she’s on a break from The Chronicle for a while.

Until Coffman returns, Eric Anderson will be providing The Chronicle’s AAPS board coverage. Eric grew up in Ann Arbor and is a graduate of Hope College. His experience includes work as a reporter at the Hillsdale Daily News and an editorial intern at the Washington Post Express. He’s planning to attend graduate school later this year.

Coverage of the AAPS board has become part of the meat-and-potatoes reporting provided by The Chronicle, along with reports on the Ann Arbor city council, the Washtenaw County board of commissioners and many other public bodies.

But not everything published in The Chronicle is meat and potatoes. I think it’s a relatively small portion of our overall corpus, but some of our material is probably more like a Twinkie than a piece of meat.

Many of the Stopped.Watched. items, for example, might be analyzed as more like Twinkies than a T-bone steak. Which, I think, is fine – for Twinkies, like T-bones, are also food. I wouldn’t want to make a meal out of Twinkies, though.

The Ann Arbor Active Against ALS Twinkie Run, which took place on April 1, serves as a nice analogy to the way we think of The Chronicle material that’s more like Twinkies.

On Friday evening in Gallup Park, the 271 runners who competed in the 5K race were presented with a choice on each of two laps through the park: (1) Take the time to eat a Twinkie and earn a 1-minute deduction to their finish time, or (2) Just keep running and take the straight-up meat-and-potatoes time. The annual run was observed last year as a Stopped.Watched. item. [Full Story]

At the Big House Big Heart Run, runners don’t throw their arms over their heads at the finish line. That victory salute typically comes a little more than 100 yards before the finish – right as runners hit the bottom of the tunnel entrance into Michigan Stadium, a.k.a. The Big House. What’s the big thrill? Oh. Come. On. You don’t think that’s a thrill? [Full Story]