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Runners get foolish for solstice weekend
- Ellie Ruel
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
Costumes and evening sun flood the streets downtown for 42nd annual Only Fools Run At Night
By Ellie Ruel
Juneau Independent
About 140 “foolish” runners and walkers sped into the solstice weekend with a 1-mile or 5-kilometer loop of downtown Juneau on Saturday night.
Many flaunted costumes featuring wacky additions like bubbles or neon colors, judged for creativity and originality before the commencement of the annual Only Fools Run At Night event.
A quartet of “lost cruise ship passengers” armed with beanies, hiking poles, maps and selfie sticks garnered the most cheers from the crowd of contestants in Centennial Hall and snagged first place in the costume contest.
Rye Spurl, one of the “tourists” wearing a printed shirt and holding a camera, said the group came up with the costume last-minute.
“Me and my wife have a rental business for cruise ship people,” Spurl said. “So it's kind of top of mind already.”
This year marked his return to running the race after a decade-long hiatus, and he said the 5K course went well.
Piper Blackgoat and Koby Yturbe’s joint costume of The Very Hungry Caterpillar won second place. The pair wore colorful strips of cardboard as a body and Yturbe held up a cutout of the head. They separated their segments for the actual run to prevent mishaps.
“I was just thinking of something that was just fun to do with my friends,” Yturbe explained.
Both were running the course for the first time, but had volunteered with the Juneau-Douglas High School: Yadaa.at Kalé cross country team to organize the race before graduating last year.
“It's nice seeing all of our underclassmen who are gonna be running next year,” Yturbe said. “It's a sunny day. We just wanted to stay fit in the sun and donate.”
Profits from race registration, usually a few thousand dollars, go towards funding the JDHS cross country team’s travel expenses which are heightened due to Juneau’s geographic isolation, said coach Abby Jahn, who’s organized the Only Fools run for four years.
She noted this year’s turnout was slightly larger than last year and the weather was ideal, but hopes to see it evolve back into its original glory.
“We saw more individual costumes this year than in prior years,” Jahn said. “But we would love to see back when they did it, probably a decade ago, or more, the really huge group costumes, and we had hundreds of people, and it would be really fun if we could get that level of participation again.”
Elena Eberhart and Miles McCauley donned blue fish headbands for their first Fool’s run.
“We're just a school of fish,” Eberhart explained. “We're pretending that we're migrating here.”
Eberhart is a graduate student studying fish locally, and the headbands were a gift from a friend who graduated last year.
“It's fun and the costumes are great,” she said. “And the weather's essentially perfect.”
The top finishers in the 1-mile category were Zack Bos in first with a time of 5:20, Milo Johnson second, and Dalton Souza third. For the 5-kilometer category, Ian Novak came in first with a time of 19:20, followed by Matt Adams in second and Sierra Westing in third.
• Contact Ellie Ruel at ellie.ruel@juneauindependent.com.
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