Quarry Lakes Regional Park in Fremont has been home to Eric Petersen's 3.2-mile "Turkey Trot" for the past decade.
In a recent New Yorker cartoon, a woman sits at a desk in front of her phone and computer. “After a nice long weekend, it’s so hard to get back into the swing of fearing the collapse of society,” she says.
I’m not sure about you, but that’s certainly what the return from Thanksgiving has felt like for me.
What a gift it was to get away from glowing screens and the never-ending news cycle to spend time with family and friends and nature. And what a gift it was to witness evidence not of society’s decline, but of my community growing stronger.
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That evidence came in the form of a 3.2-mile Turkey Trot race at Quarry Lakes Regional Park in Fremont, which my family and I have run almost every year since it was founded more than a decade ago by Eric Petersen, my youth cross-country coach.
Petersen told me he originally organized the trot to help his runners stay in shape during the gap between cross country and track seasons. There were about 30 people at the race the first time I ran it, almost all part of my youth sports program.
The race has seemed to grow every year since, expanding to include people of all ages and abilities and morphing from a training event to a neighborhood-wide social. This Thanksgiving, Petersen said, there were 115 runners — many of whom said they heard about the race through word of mouth.
As we took our places on the starting line, I could sense that the youngest kids would explode in a sprint, only to halt in their tracks when they realized they couldn’t sustain that pace. I smiled when my prediction came true about 30 seconds after the race began.
The sun beat down and a light breeze blew as we pounded down a gravel path slicing between deep-blue lakes — Lago Los Osos and Horseshoe Lake — the same path on which my high-school cross-country team used to train. I inhaled deeply, breathing in the fresh familiar smell of the water and the plants lining the path, as I pushed myself to hold a faster-than-usual pace. As runners passed each other, they called out encouragements and gave each other high-fives.
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I crossed the finish line with my brother, who had decided to run with me even though he could have gone much faster.
That’s the ethos of the Turkey Trot: friendly competition, with an emphasis on friendly.
Petersen calls his event “a reunion for [different] eras of groups of kids.”
I don’t frequently see many of my former cross-country teammates, as almost all of us have moved away from Fremont, but I can always count on seeing them at the Turkey Trot. It’s one of the few constants in our lives since we went away to college and embarked on different careers.
Most of us aren’t quite as fast as we were in our high school days, but the race isn’t just about winning (though the winners of each age group do get a homemade pumpkin pie). As Petersen noted, some participants — me included — hang out and talk for several hours, catching up amid our sweaty, post-race runner’s high on everything that’s happened over the past year.
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But Petersen’s Turkey Trot has also become a defining holiday tradition for my family. We start talking about the race months before it actually happens, and embark on half-fun, half-serious “time trials” in the lead-up to the race, vowing to beat whoever finished ahead of us the year before.
This can result in pre-race jitters and post-race exhaustion, but that’s all part of the fun. (No wonder some people’s greatest fear is marrying into a “Turkey Trot family.”)
But we aren’t the only Turkey Trot-obsessed family.
“There’s people that reach out to me in October, like, ‘Are you still going to still have the race?’ ” Petersen told me.
The Turkey Trot’s growing popularity in my neighborhood — and the number of people who clearly are looking forward to it months in advance — reveal just how strong our desire for community is in the wake of the isolation brought on by the pandemic.
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It’s also a reminder of the power of coming together even as the world seems on the verge of tearing itself apart. The wars between Russia and Ukraine, and Israel and Hamas, have underscored the precarity of our connections — how quickly families and communities and nations can shatter.
While we cannot shy away from these realities, it’s also critically important — and incredibly restorative — to remind ourselves that the opposite is also true: that communities can endure and thrive despite the challenging times.
It’s easy to feel unmoored in such an unstable world. But there’s something about running each Thanksgiving with friends old and new that brings me right back down to earth.
Reach Emily Hoeven: emily.hoeven@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @emily_hoeven
News cycle dystopia is everywhere. A Thanksgiving Turkey Trot helped me defeat its power
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28.11.2023
Quarry Lakes Regional Park in Fremont has been home to Eric Petersen's 3.2-mile "Turkey Trot" for the past decade.
In a recent New Yorker cartoon, a woman sits at a desk in front of her phone and computer. “After a nice long weekend, it’s so hard to get back into the swing of fearing the collapse of society,” she says.
I’m not sure about you, but that’s certainly what the return from Thanksgiving has felt like for me.
What a gift it was to get away from glowing screens and the never-ending news cycle to spend time with family and friends and nature. And what a gift it was to witness evidence not of society’s decline, but of my community growing stronger.
Advertisement
Article continues below this ad
That evidence came in the form of a 3.2-mile Turkey Trot race at Quarry Lakes Regional Park in Fremont, which my family and I have run almost every year since it was founded more than a decade ago by Eric Petersen, my youth cross-country coach.
Petersen told me he originally organized the trot to help his runners stay in shape during the gap between cross country and track seasons. There were about 30 people at the race the first time I ran it, almost all part of my youth sports program.
The race has seemed to grow every year........
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