Moonlight Run on the road again

By Justin Seward - Lethbridge Herald on March 23, 2022.

For the first time in three years, the Runner’s Soul Society was able to host the 35th annual Moonlight Run in person on Saturday night.
The in-person loop included either a six kilometre or 10 kilometre run that began at Casa before heading down into the river valley and doing a loop around Indian Battle Park before concluding with a jaunt back to Casa up the Wendy’s hill.
As for the virtual event, participants could run or walk and had to log their time between 8 a.m. on March 19 to midnight on March 27.
“Another COVID thing was we kept our numbers lower than we’d normally do in a regular year,” said Shawn Pinder, Moonlight Run director.
“So a 1,500-person limit and we did hit that with a combination of both virtual and in person and I think we had just over 1,300 participants at the in-person event and that’s who would have come out last night.”
With the new dual format this year, Pinder says generally the population has a large variety of comfort levels with where things are at now with COVID.
“There’s certainly some people that are comfortable with coming out to an in-person event and have been for some time and others that are still not comfortable gathering with people,” he said.
“So, we wanted to give people a lot of different options and still providing them an event that they can use as a goal and get out and do some activities.”
Pinder said, “It was great actually,” when it came to the atmosphere.
“Like even though quite a bit smaller what we’d normally have in a typical year — it was just nice to have that number of people and see them heading out on to the race course last night was fantastic, a lot of energy.”
Organizers strive to give runners an enjoyable experience.
“We changed it to the current route because the event is fairly large and actually have that now that we’re more concentrated on the roadways. We have a little bit more space to work with that number of people,” said Pinder.
The vast majority of runners came from Alberta, however there were 10 from B.C., 14 from Saskatchewan, and one from Manitoba, as well as 10 participating virtually from Ontario, one from Nova Scotia, and another from Australia.