As they cross the finish line of the Glass City Marathon on Sunday, runners will be rewarded with a shiny medal to commemorate the accomplishment — 26.2 hard-fought miles.
But what to do with that medal once the photos are snapped and the brief opportunity to wear such jewelry without raising eyebrows has waned?
Add it to the collection.
For the seasoned athletes of the Toledo Roadrunners Club, it can be easy to build up a frankly overwhelming collection of memorabilia. There are the medals and ribbons presented to finishers, the plaques and trophies presented to winners; some sentimental runners save their race bibs and treasure their included-in-registration T-shirts.
Some are rightfully valued mementos, testament to the hard work that brought them to the finish line of their very first race or of a prestigious course like the Boston Marathon; Bellevue's Vicki Schoen said she makes it a point to save her hardware from the Glass City Marathons. Others medals and plaques and trophies, though, pile up less in a much less sentimental fashion through years of race after local race.
“It was getting out of control, according to my wife,” said Sylvania's Mark Stender, one of many club members who’s been forced to consider medal management. A runner since high school, Mr. Stender figures he's been in hundreds of races, and plans to add one more to his count in Glass City's Savage 5K on Saturday.
“So we made a pact that she would do a nice photo album," he continued.
The album includes photos of many of his medals and trophies and T-shirts, plus team photos and the like. Like a quilt his wife, Barbara, also put together to display some of his race shirts, it's a more manageable way to commemorate his accomplishments, they've found.
He's since donated or tossed much of his collection, paring it down to just the most meaningful.
“I kept a few select things that were very personal,” he said.
Share the wealth
In most of a lifetime’s worth of 5Ks and 10Ks, as well as the decade's worth of marathons that she began running once she turned 50, Vicki Schoen has also picked up plenty of hardware. She plans to collect some more in the Glass City Marathon on Sunday.
“It’s not that I’m a good runner,” Ms. Schoen said with good-natured honesty. “It’s just one of those things where I have been to so many small-town races where I’m the only one in my age division, so I get a really nice plaque or trophy for being first.”
She’s found local opportunities to repurpose some of these less sentimental items, both as a youth coach and a race director for church or charity races. They’re not the sort of situations where she’s been presented a budget for awards, she said. So she dug into her own collection.
“We’d take a blow dryer and a putty knife and pop the old plates off. Then when we donated the awards back to these places. All they had to do was order the new plates, peel the tape off and stick them on,” she said. “They were really nice trophies and plaques.”
It’s worth checking in with local organizations, to see if they might welcome this type of donation, she suggested to others with an overwhelming stash. There are also national organizations who solicit them, like Sports Medal Recycling and Medals4Mettle.
Mary Steinhauser, of La Salle, Mich., welcomes them, too. A fellow runner in the health care field came up with the idea several years ago to donate medals to children's hospitals, always modified with an encouraging message, and Ms. Steinhauser has since taken up the cause.
Since the coronavirus pandemic has complicated their relationships with regional hospitals, she’s been leaving some in the parks where she runs, in hopes of brightening the day of a passer-by in Ansted Park in Temperance and Indian Creek Park in Lambertville.
Her own stash of medals is deep: She estimates that she's registered in more 1,600 races since she got into running at 47. Now 76, she's going strong toward a goal of tallying 2,000, with plans to run the relay in the Glass City Marathon on Sunday.
Like Ms. Schoen, too, though, she holds on to her most meaningful honors.
“I try to keep the marathon ones,” she said; she's run 55 so far. “I have them on my back patio.”
Show them off
Nine-year-old Ryder Rush hasn't yet reached his double-digit birthday, but he could be counted among the seasoned runners himself. He's aiming to run 100 races by June 1, and is already most of the way there. His 95th and 96th was just this weekend at the Florence Scott Libbey 419 5K, where he additionally served as the race director for its Rush the 419 Kids Race – the first kid to take on that responsibility under the Toledo Roadrunners Club.
He “proudly displays his medals in his bedroom and his ribbons are displayed on the side of the refrigerator,” his mother shared in an email.
He’s in good company among those who carve out a space in their home to display some or all of their honors. The Toledo Roadrunners Club's Carlos Carvalho calls his a “shrine,” while Tim and Clara Eckel, of Toledo, appropriately call theirs the “trophy room.”
Tim Eckel has been racing for somewhere around 15 years, tallying 178 races. His wife, who doesn't keep as close a count on her registrations, has been running for around eight years.
Add in some triathlons, and they had accumulated enough memorabilia to fill a small room. So, about four years ago, they did, papering over one wall of a small office with race bibs, hanging many of their medals above a desk and creating a sort of shelf “shrine” of their own.
There’s a lot to look at in the trophy room, but they can point to some mementos that stand out as particularly special. Mr. Eckel looks particularly to what he’s brought back from the Boston Marathon, and, just this week, he added a bib to the room from his first-ever race. He had just uncovered it, to his surprise, as he was cleaning his father's house. And Ms. Eckel looks to some medals that in themselves are interesting, made from wood or glass.
They’re planning to run the half-marathon on Sunday – and add a few more to their collection.
First Published April 23, 2021, 12:00 p.m.
