Boston BYU Alumni 5K Fun Run

About a year and a half ago Jeff and I were asked to become board members of the BYU Alumni Association in Boston. Jeff became the chapter treasurer and I was put in charge of chapter events! For the past year my main project has been planning and organizing the BYU Boston Alumni 3rd Annual 5K event. I learned a lot from the process and am glad I was given this opportunity! If you ever need to put a 5K together I've got a great list of "to-do's" and "how-to's" compiled that I'd be happy to share!

We were lucky enough (actually it had nothing to do with luck and everything to do with booking the site nine months in advance) to have the race at the beautiful Chestnut Hill Reservoir, near the Boston College campus. Several people came up to me after the race and said they were so glad we had the event here because they had never been and were pleasantly surprised at how scenic it was. Seriously, if you live in the area and have never made it over to Chestnut Hill, it is well worth the visit. Especially now that it is fall and the leaves are turning!!!

There was a misty fog rolling across the reservoir as we prepared to take our places and start the race. Made for a cool atmosphere!

Some of my favorite parts of planning this event:

Designing the t-shirts!

A big thank you to Rose Serago for using her Photoshop expertise to make the idea for the shirt design a reality! You did in twenty minutes what would have taken me a year to learn and figure out. Thank you, thank you!! They were a hit!

Decorating!
I really enjoyed being behind the scenes and getting all of the fun details prepared for this event. I couldn't have done it alone though! Thanks to everyone who showed up early to help set up!

We kept it pretty simple, but the decorations added a little flair and made the race official.

And of course, actually running the race!
What a great way to start a saturday morning, and a beautiful place to do it! So much fun! We did two laps around the reservoir and were welcomed by high fives from Cosmo, (the actual Cosmo was busy attending a cougar football game on the west coast but he lent a hand, literally, to our event) and a fun finish line with music and streamers.

Congrats to Emily Raymond! First place overall finisher!

And congrats to Jeff! First place mens finisher! And he even hung back with me for the first lap!

We made friends with some local runners who were excited to be part of the fun : )

Our volunteers did an awesome job of cheering everyone on!

It felt good knowing that all of the effort and proceeds from the race would go towards need-based scholarships for local students wishing to go to college at BYU Provo, Idaho, Hawaii and LDS Business college. Two cheers for education! A worthy cause indeed!

Thanks to everyone who came out to participate and support the event! Special thanks to Jeff for supporting me as I planned and stressed, especially in the weeks before the race, and for putting together a rockin' playlist for race-day. Thank you Josh Drean for being an excellent emcee and pumping everyone up before the race, even after taking a red eye flight into Boston the morning of the race! Shout out to Lauren Drean for getting the PA system ready for the event. Thank you Julia Blake, our chapter president, for taking charge of registration on the day of the race. To Roy Brinkerhoff, my contact at BYU, for getting our online registration page set up! Many thanks to Jessica Sainsbury, a previous BYU Alumni Chapter president, who helped me along the way answering all of my first-timer questions and sharing her wisdom! And thank you to everyone who came out and had a good time! I'm so glad we have a strong alumni presence on the east coast and that we can get together for fun activities and BYU reminiscing. Go Cougars!!!