One Apple Festival event will take place this year, although in a much different form, following cancellation of the two fall festivals it normally precedes.
The 5K road race that traditionally kicks off the first weekend of both the Georgia Apple Festival and downtown Ellijay’s Apple Arts will be held in a virtual format this year, confirmed 5K director and Gilmer High School Cross Country Coach Tommy Jones.
“After they canceled the Apple Festival, we talked about if we want to try to do the race or not. I’d been thinking about doing it virtually anyway and I know a lot of other races have done the same thing through all this,” Jones said.
“The way it works is people still sign up online or by mailing in their registration. They have a timeframe in which they will go run a 5K somewhere on their own. They will submit their time to us and we will do results based off the submitted times. It’s not ideal, but we still want to make it available to everybody the best we can under these circumstances.”
Jones said he looked at a few other ways to do the race, but given the continuing COVID-19 pandemic, this was the safest option.
“We had thought about other possibilities (like) some races have sent waves of people at different times, but our 5K is a pretty big community type of thing. We usually have close to 200 who do the 5K, then we have a one-mile fun run for kids and we usually have close to 20 who do that. We all meet in the gym and we’ve got hundreds of people together. There’s no way to do social distancing with that,” he noted.
According to the official announcement for the race, you can run (or walk) anywhere — a treadmill, a track, a park, your neighborhood, anywhere you like provided the distance is 3.1 miles. The 5K can be done anytime from Saturday, Aug. 29, until Saturday, Oct. 10.
“You don’t have to be in any certain place and we’re doing it on the honor system. If you run it on a flat track or down at the park, you may have an advantage over running it (somewhere) with a lot of hills,” Jones said. “My plan is that everybody who registers will still get a T-shirt that will be mailed to them and hopefully we will still be able to do awards and that sort of thing like we’ve done in the past.”
This will be the 44th year for the Apple Festival 5K, which normally takes racers up North Main Street and around the downtown square, then back down North Main, up Old Highway 5 a piece and past Ellijay Elementary School before finishing.
“The first Saturday of the Apple Festival is when we’ve always had it and that works out good because the Marble Festival (in Jasper) has a 5K and it’s the weekend before. I feel like a lot of people do both races,” said Jones. “It’s pretty amazing that this is going to be our 44th Apple Festival race. It really didn’t hit me till the other day that this is the Peachtree’s 51st year, so they are just a little bit older than our race.”
Jones said anyone who wants to take part in the virtual 5K can register online at Active.com or AppleFestival5K.com. Registration forms, entry fee information and other details can also be found at those locations.
This is normally when Jones would be working to line up sponsors for the race that benefits the high school cross country program.
“Right about now, the big thing would be getting sponsors and getting people signed up. When school starts, I get the team out there trying to get sponsors and get people registered, but we’ve been delayed on that this year,” he said.
Jones said he enjoyed running the local 5K for a long time before starting as the race’s director three years ago.
“My first year would have been 1991 or ‘92. I was between sophomore and junior year of college the first year I ran it,” he said.
The cross country coach still plans on running in this year’s Peachtree Road Race, which has been rescheduled from its usual date of July 4.
“They gave you the options of either getting a refund, transferring to next year’s July Fourth or running it on Thanksgiving. I elected to try to do the Thanksgiving (race) As of right now, they’re still planning on doing that,” he added.