"John's Half"

And now for a little White Rock history lesson....For those of you that run with us on our long runs and have heard us refer to our Lakewood split as "John's Half", here's why. In 1991 John Jenkins designed the route to add distance, scenery, and hills to the basic 9 mile loop, which quickly became his group's weekly training run. Bob Luchsinger of the group decided to use this course to put on a race to benefit the Plano Pacers. Their 1991 race had over 500 runners. It was never intended to be an annual event, but in 1992 a group of people threw it together last minute, minus sponsorship, T-shirts, course monitors, traffic control, trophies, etc. About 90 runners showed up and ran this race, including myself. When we crossed the line we were handed index cards to fill out, thus placing us in the race. I remember having a really fun time that day. We vowed to return every year to run the race unofficially, but never did. Instead, we continue to include the route in our training runs. The only modification to the original route is that we no longer run all the way to Northwest Hwy, instead, running the Mockingbird, and now dog park bridge portion instead. I came across the results of the 1992 race...some of you may recognize some people in this list. I circled Jan Richard's name right by mine. You may still see glimpses of Jan Richards at White Rock lake, even though she is now in her 80's!