On the eve of the most important race weekend of the year, I am thinking about how lucky I am to be a dreamer; and furthermore, how lucky I am to be someone that’s gotten the chance to make dreams become reality.
This Sunday is the 5th annual Running The Ave 5K, which, if you don’t already know, is the impetus for Second Capital Running. Everything started with the vision for this one race, and it’s brought us to unimaginable places and created a community that this company would be nothing without. RTA5K is my true north as a race director. My entire year revolves around the chance to bring another iteration of it to my hometown and the people that love it.
At 5 years, the average human has begun to get a grip on things like numbers, letters, words, social relationships, and more. It’s an exciting phase of life because a 5 year old has come so far from what they could and [mostly] couldn’t do at age 1, but also still has so many years left to live and learn. At year 5 of RTA5K, I think there are some similarities in the way the race has grown as compared to the growth of a 5 year old child. Year 1 was all about coming into the world and breathing life into the vision. At that time, I thought that was the dream - just to make it finally exist after a months long gestational process - and it was. After a few years of learning and experimenting, and most importantly, discovering what it was that made the race special to the runners that keep coming back each year, I think I see the dream differently: the dream is witnessing the life of the vision unfold, not its arrival.
To explain what I mean, I want to go back to the example of a child. When you’re expecting the baby, the dream is it being born and the moment you finally meet. The baby is born and the dream comes true. But that’s just the beginning. The baby becomes a toddler and the dream becomes seeing them go to their first day of school, making friends, and morphing into a little individual. It only continues to evolve from there. They’re a teenager, and then a graduate, and then they’re an adult doing their part in the world. Maybe even one day the dream is them becoming parents and creating dreams of their own.
In the beginning you thought your dream came true when this person - your vision, if you may, entered your world, but really the dream is seeing their entire life unfold before you . Every year your dream is rediscovered through their own evolution, and you don’t stop running down that dream until your last breath.
I’ve been running down my own dream for the last 5 years, and this year I have a clearer picture than last year of just how far I have to go, and just how much this race will evolve right before my eyes. It’s an exciting phase, and I’m lucky to share that excitement with people that feel equally as invested in the life of this race; the runners that have been here every year since it’s start and the city stakeholders that help make it happen. They say it takes a village to raise a child. The same goes for turning a race into a local icon.
This Sunday kicks off seven straight weeks of races in Vineland, with the Vineland Grand Prix Series starting the following week on July 5, and then our newest addition, the North VIneland Road Race closes out the Summer circuit on August 6.
- Andre “Andy” Rivera
Founder & Race Director