Maura Elizabeth Cunningham

Happy New Year!

I decided to ring in 2025 by signing up for a New Year’s 5K duo: Out With the Old (December 31) and In With the New (January 1). The course loops around Bloomer Park in Rochester, MI; the first day’s race goes counter-clockwise, the next one clockwise. While it was cold both days (temperatures in the 30s), I didn’t have to contend with any active precipitation or snow on the ground—pretty much ideal conditions for Michigan in the winter.

The race started along the Clinton River, site of the never-completed Clinton-Kalamazoo Canal, before entering the park. The New Year’s Eve race involved a climb up “Bunker Hill”: ”think of it as a symbolic climb into the new year with strength and determination,” the race info guide enthused. 🤨

Hiking up the hill was indeed tough—but I realized, looking down at its matted leaves and muddy trail, that going down the next day would be even more difficult. Other slippery and boggy spots along the course also caused me to lose my footing, so on New Year’s Day I came prepared with a set of hiking poles.

I don’t generally care too much about my race times. Overall, I’d like to see my pace improve over time, but I recognize that course conditions and how I’m feeling on any given day will affect how long it takes me to complete a distance. Still, it was somewhat disheartening to make my way down Bunker Hill with small, tentative steps and realize that it was going to take me an hour or more to complete a 5K. (My official time wound up being 1:00:26.)

Still, that felt like a somewhat appropriate way to mark the start of a new year: it wasn’t easy, but I finished. I didn’t fall. (Thank you, hiking poles.) I didn’t do as well as I either expected or hoped … but I finished.

At this time of year when there’s so much emphasis on resolutions and goals and accomplishing things, it might have been nice to have a really easy 5K course—flat and paved, the kind of race where I finish and feel like I still have so much energy I could do it all over again right away. (I absolutely did not feel like that either day.) But in terms of life lessons—so annoying but so useful—this was probably more instructive.

Welcome to 2025.

Featured photo: Banner for Out With the Old, In With the New 5K pair, Rochester, MI, December 31, 2024.