Strathmore Run Club joins national 5K run for the holidays
By John Watson Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
The Strathmore Run Club is participating in a Canada-wide five kilometre run to raise money for Make a Wish Canada.
Members of the club can be seen running in the Strathmore community, having donned Santa suits to spread some holiday cheer and to make themselves known.
“This is something brand new that the Strathmore Run Club is doing. This is a nationwide run for celebrating Christmas, called the HoHoHoliday 5K Run,” said Diana Baird, speaking on behalf of the Strathmore Run Club. “This is for anybody across Canada, and it can be done anytime during the month of December. We all ordered our Santa suits so that we could participate and spread some Christmas cheer.”
The national fundraiser is supported by the purchase of the Santa suits by those who are interested in running the five kilometres.
Baird added that the fundraising portion from ordering the suits aside, members of the run club are largely participating just for the fun of it.
“The national program of it is a fundraiser for when we signed up online and purchased our Santa suits, but for us we are primarily doing it just for fun and to make people smile and get a few honks from the cars who drive by.”
This year marks the first occasion that the Strathmore Run Club is participating in this particular run. In order to give more opportunities for members to participate, the club ran formally on Dec. 10, and will again on Dec. 17.
Baird said 20 members of the Strathmore Run Club have indicated interest to run between the two scheduled days.
“This is always a busy time of year, we cannot get everybody together on a single day to do this run, so we decided to go with two Sundays to give more of our club members the opportunity to come out and run,” she said. “One of the members and I went and did a trial run on Sunday (Dec. 3) and we ran along George Freeman and we got all sorts of people honking and waving at us which really made us feel good about it.”
The aim, she added, is for this event to become an annual occasion for the Strathmore Run Club, and she hopes to encourage more people to come out and join in – Santa suits are optional, but folks are invited and recommended to wear holiday-themed attire.