Last night was the Maine Track Club annual banquet, celebrating the club’s 30th birthday. The evening was a lot of fun, with plenty of folks attending, plenty of good food, plenty of door prizes, and a plethora of awards.
The club honored it’s founder, Brian “Ziggy” Gillespie (who was the coach for “Run to Win” when I first moved to Maine and provided the inspiration for this site’s name) for his contributions to Maine running since the 1960s. Ziggy is (as far as I know) the only person that appears in both the Maine Running Hall of Fame as well as the Maine Baseball Hall of Fame. He has coached numerous successful teams throughout the years, put on more races than I could count, and helped make the Maine Track Club what it is today when he started it back in the 1970s.
The table that I was sitting at did pretty well with the awards. We had two folks win gift certificates as door prizes, we had 3 age group awards (myself, Floyd Lavery, and Amy Lilley), I won the Outstanding Contributions award, Martha Lippa received recognition for having run her first marathon, and Carry Buterbaugh won Runner of the Year.
I’d also like to mention the two volunteers of the year, David Colby Young and Don Penta, who do an outstanding job photographing the majority of the races throughout the state. It did make things a little interesting while they were receiving their awards, though, as the folks who had the cameras handed to them then had to figure out how to use them.
David took video of the evening and has a few photographs up on his site, Maine Running Photos.com. Don’s photos will probably appear on the site within the next week or two.
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