Great article that appeared in the Salem News about the Wicked Running Club, the Wicked Frosty Four and the Salem Race Series!
By Chris Cassidy
SALEM — With the windchill factor, Doug Bollen estimates the temperature at the starting line last New Year’s morning was around 15 degrees — below zero.
“It was brutally cold with the wind whipping around Dead Horse Beach,” recalled the city’s parks and recreation director.
Yet, more than 300 runners from all over the North Shore marked the 10th hour of 2009 by testing the boundaries of their sanity and competing in the Frosty Four, a frigid four-mile road race through Salem.
Not even bone-chilling temperatures or sacred holidays can disrupt Salem’s running rituals.
This is a city with a year-round road-race calendar and a running club of nearly 300 members who are such hard-core devotees to the sport that many of them met up Christmas morning at 8 a.m. just to fulfill their weekly Saturday group run.
A record field of more than 1,500 runners took part in the Wild Turkey run on Thanksgiving Day. Already, nearly 400 people have registered for the 2011 edition of the Frosty Four on Jan. 1.
“This is the biggest boom I’ve ever seen,” Bollen said. “More and more people are taking part in running. … I think it’s a great thing, and cities and towns have embraced it.”
But none on the North Shore has tapped that enthusiasm quite like Salem.
Continue reading ‘Annual New Year’s Day race draws hard-core runners by the hundreds’
