race Ts

Cleaning my closet today … this is my collection of race T-shirts. It must go back to about 1996. We have the Union Leader Millyard Classic 5K, the 1999 New Bedford (Mass.) Half-Marathon, the 2003 NYC Marathon Tune-Up, the 2001 Federation of Italian-American Organizations of Queens 5K Run, the 2005 Queens Half-Marathon, the 1996 Sapienza Memorial 5 miler (Haverhill, Mass.), the Jingle Bell Run and Walk (somewhere, sometime in N.H.), the 1998 Healthsource Corporate Road Race (Manchester, N.H.), the 2000 Bill Luti 5-miler (Concord, N.H.), the 2002 Fight Against Prostate Cancer 5 miler (Central Park), the 2001 Long Beach Memorial Run, the 2001 Not Quite the NYC Marathon 5K (Central Park), the Fall Foliage 5K XC (somewhere in N.H), the 2003 Thomas G. Labrecque Classic (Central Park)…

And those are just the shirts at the top of this huge plastic ziplock bag I just purchased! There’s a lot more.

Plus, the T-shirts I really like — the ones from my marathons, and the more stylish ones from shorter races — are actually in my dresser draws. Those ones I actually wear sometimes.

And of course the shirts I am most most fond of are the few technical shirts from the Nike races and the Healthy Kidney 10K. Unlike the cotton Ts, these actually wick sweat away from your body. (NYRR, why can’t you give us fewer shirts and more technical ones?)

Anyway. Do I throw them all away? So many memories… I’ve thought about about getting them made into a quilt, but that’d be about $300 or so. (I guess it’d be easy to do it myself … if i had a sewing machine). So for now, they’re just in my closet.