There’s still time to sign up for the Salem Distance Run, which will be held through the streets of Salem on Saturday morning, August 9th. This is the 51st year since the run debuted in the summer of 1975.
Hunter Holliday, a member of Salem City Council, was a student at Andrew Lewis High School in 1975 and he ran in the very first race. One of the many things on his agenda when he was elected to council was to bring the race back to the days before COVID, when it was one of the top distance runs in the Roanoke Valley.
“I was a ninth grader on the Andrew Lewis track team,” said Holliday of the first distance run. “I think we had 14 from the team run in that first race.”
Holliday ticked off the names of Bobby Brugh, Billy Bird, Doug Graham, Steve Surratt and Mark David as some of the Lewis distance runners who led the Wolverines to many wins in the mid-70s and ran in those early races. They were some good memories for Hunter and he wasn’t happy when the race was held around the grounds of the Salem Civic Center a few years ago. It had become second fiddle to the October Half-Marathon, and Holliday was adamant that there was plenty of room in Salem for both.
“They ran around the ballpark in 2022 and I was elected in November that year,” said Holliday. “We didn’t have the race in ’23 when Health Focus dropped out and we didn’t have a sponsor. I made it a point to get it back in ’24 and we were able to find the sponsors to do so.”
The race was a big success last summer with 14 sponsors and close to 300 runners. The race raised enough money to not only pay for itself but to make a donation to the Adult Care Center.
This year, the race will donate money toward the restoration of the Preston House, the oldest standing house in the City of Salem. Located on West Main Street next to the Go Mart, the Preston House was built in 1820 and has an illustrious history.
“There’s a lot of history behind it,” said Holliday. “It was on the main route through Salem and right across from the Andrew Lewis Tavern. It’s rumored that Davey Crockett once stayed there. I’ve heard that Andrew Jackson stayed there once, and King Phillipe of France, who was prince at the time.”
The house was a private residence for years and was the family home of Dr. Esther Brown and Ray K. Brown, who was on the faculty at Roanoke College, before it became a tea house. COVID shut down the tea house and now the Salem Museum has the building. The money raised from the distance run will go toward renovations with an eye on possibly adding a location for the Salem Museum.
The Salem Distance Run has plenty of history itself. Richard Browder, who now lives in Port Haywood, VA, was a longtime teacher and coach at Andrew Lewis and Salem High Schools as well as Roanoke College. He ran track for Lewis under legendary coach Ray Bussard and was instrumental in starting the Salem Distance Run when he coached track and cross country at Lewis, then a high school.
“There had never been such a thing in the Roanoke Valley,” said Browder, who has participated in every Salem Distance Run except two. “The first distance run of any kind was the Lexington to Buena Vista 10,000 meters, which was run at Christmas time. They ran from Lexington to Buena Vista one year, then Buena Vista to Lexington the next.”
Browder noted that Frank Shorter of the United States won the Olympic Marathon race in Munich, Germany in 1972, and that was a big spark for distance running. Browder and Salem’s Darr Graham, a running enthusiast who worked at the Baptist Home, felt a distance run would go over big here and approached Don Thorne, who was the Salem Recreation Director at the time, with their idea.
“He said ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ but I’ll support it,” said Browder.
Richard laid out a course that started at Longwood Park and about 40 runners competed in the first race. As he recalls the VMI cross country coach brought his freshmen runners to the race and they dominated that first year.
A couple changes were made to the course to avoid blind curves and participation grew. In the fourth or fifth year Dr. Robert Jenkins of Roanoke College, an avid runner himself, volunteered to design a 5K and 10K course.
“He took his bicycle and calibrated the distance,” said Browder. “Once we got that established there wasn’t any reason to change, because it worked.”
And so the race, with sponsors and great support from people like Teri Atkins, Kathy Murphy and others at the Salem Department of Parks Recreation, continued to be a highlight of the summer running season.
In 2016 Salem inaugurated the annual Salem Half-Marathon and the distance run took a back seat, but still had plenty of participants. The COVID hurt, but with the support of folks like Holliday it’s back and running, so to speak.
Runners can sign up for the race on the Salem website, and you can even show up the day of the race. The gun goes off at 8 am and you can still register on the site from 6:30 to 7:30 am.
