Imagine you’ve just completed the 10K Cooper River Bridge Run, which you walked and jogged with your mom, your boyfriend’s mom and his aunt. You’re tired — and you’re dressed as Cinderella, courtesy of an idea from your boyfriend’s mom. (The other three are dressed as the Fairy Godmother, Wicked Stepmother and a sister of the Wicked Stepmother, respectively.
“It was cute,” Kelsey Bates said. “She tried to get us to wear ball gowns, but I said absolutely not. So I did tutus and the colors. She enjoyed it and I wasn’t too against it.”
As you approach Marion Square for the race Finish Festival, the Fairy Godmother points out a special “Chasing Cinderella” finish line and urges you to run through it.
On the other side is Prince Charming on bended knee.
“When I saw him down on his knee in a Prince Charming shirt, I was just shocked and then I realized what was happening!”
Engaged on Bridge Run day in 2019, she and Cab Bates married the following year. They have two children and live in the Huger area.
Rain or shine, runners will ‘get over it’
The Cooper River Bridge Run will welcome more than 35,000 runners to Mount Pleasant this year to run across the Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge through downtown.
When the race started in 1978, just 766 finishers made it to the end. This year, the bridge run turns 48. (It should be 49, but the Covid pandemic interrupted one year.)
On April 3 and 4, the event will welcome runners at its Health and Wellness Expo at the Charleston Area Convention Center, staffed by 200+ booths and vendors.
On April 5 — Race Day — wheelchair participants will zoom to a start at 7:25 a.m., followed by runners at 8 a.m. Participants will ascend the grueling 4.8% grade up the bridge, before having an easier time going down.
The run, which touts itself as “the best organized and best conducted 10K race in the world,” has a huge fiscal impact every year. It pumps about $33 million into the local economy over the weekend as visitors pack hotels and flock to local restaurants and beer halls. It also generates thousands of dollars annually to charities.
And while most “get over” the bridge and finish the race, many treasure the experience of running with waves of people headed to complete a common goal. And that, in turn, inspires stories, tens of thousands a year. Here are some of them.
Ironmen of the Bridge Run
Mostly retired Realtor Owen Meislin and fully retired sales professional John Weeks are two Bridge Run stalwarts who live in Charleston.
“John and Owen are the Ironmen of the Bridge Run,” said Race Director Irv Batten. “They have completed all 47 races and are signed up for the 48th.”
This year, they’ve been getting ready to run it again, but with a twist. Both will be running in 2025 as new members of the Bridge Run Hall of Fame.
For years, Meislin ran the race with an Atlanta friend. Through it all, they’ve had a friendly competition, sometimes sandbagging each other with jokes.
During one race a few years back, everything was going well until Meislin lost his friend in the crowd.
“I knew this cagey guy had something up his sleeve,” he said. As the finish line approached, he spotted his friend on the left.
“I’m not sure how he got there. He never passed me … So I sneaked past him way to the right and started booking it to the finish line. I had a stealth frame of mind, crossed the finish line and turned back. … There was Mark coming up and he said, ‘I beat you and I had already finished the race.’ ”
But Meislin, 72, never took the bait. “He probably cut through and went straight through to the finish line.”
Last year’s Bridge Run was a little different for the 83-year-old Weeks due to a memorable mishap. Just before he crossed the finish line, he felt a knee give. He crashed into a fence and hit his head.
“I was able to get up and finish the run,” he recalled. “A few months later, I thought I was having a migraine headache but it didn’t go away for three days.”
Turns out that he had some brain bleeding that required surgery in November. A month later, he was cleared to exercise again.
“I’m back to running now,” he said, adding that his knee still gives him a little trouble. “I did a four-mile practice run the other day. I’m planning to make this one the 48th in a row … My goal is to run 50 bridge runs in 50 years.”
‘Banged up’ in the Bridge Run
In the early years of the Bridge Run, West Ashley resident Gail Bailey was uber-competitive. One year — probably around 1980 — rain started pouring as she started to warm-up.
“I had this hairstyle where the bangs would flop in front of my face,” she recalled. With the rain matting her hair, she couldn’t see too well.
“I went over to the Old Village, went up to somebody’s house and asked if I could borrow a pair of scissors. I just cut my bangs off on the front porch.”
It didn’t look pretty, she said, but it worked because she could see.
“People were used to that sort of stuff. They knew I was really serious about my racing.”
‘A cascading Froot Loop rainbow’
Mount Pleasant Mayor Will Haynie, who will be honored with a civic award this year for being a longtime Bridge Run booster, offers the case of the Froot Loops as his most memorable race story.
Several years back, he and his friends were very serious about running, setting a goal to run the 10K race in 40 minutes or less.
Back then, starting points were informal clusters of runners who expected to run similar times. He and his buddies lined up in the 35-40 minute zone behind a guy who didn’t really fit.
“That guy obviously had not trained and did not know anything about running. He started out in front of us.”
The guy kept a good pace over the first hump of the old Grace Bridge but as he started up the second, something happened.
“He lost his breakfast right there on the bridge and it was obvious that he had eaten Froot Loops for breakfast,” Haynie chuckled. “All of us had to tip-toe around a cascading Froot Loop rainbow.”
No one in his group got slimed, but Haynie still wonders, “Who eats Froot Loops before a 10K?”
Crawling to a finish
Mount Pleasant resident Tami Dennis, who coached youths for years on running the race, participated 32 years in a row.
One year, her husband was giving her a pep talk and asked, out of the blue, whether she had ever collapsed.
“No,” she said to which he replied she must have had “more in the tank” in other runs.
“Well, I must have taken his words to heart because with 100 meters left, I collapsed on the road and started crawling to the finish line,” she said. “I actually made it ‘on TV’ crawling to the finish.
“That was the last time I’ve asked for advice before a race! And it was the last time I collapsed at the end!”
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