A White House Run and Then a ‘Turkey Trot’ – By Carl M. Cannon (Real Clear Politics) / Nov 26 2019
Twenty-seven years ago today, a relatively youthful — although not entirely svelte – U.S. politician went for a five-kilometer run. It was more than a jog. William Jefferson Clinton was a participant in the Little Rock YMCA’s annual “Turkey Trot.”
Arkansas’ 46-year-old governor had been elected president of the United States three weeks earlier and the Thanksgiving Day run was a chance for old friends and jogging buddies to say goodbye to a man who’d run the race the previous five years. Rusty Miller, a board member of the Arkansas Running Club, presented Clinton with a windbreaker with the group’s logo on it. “We wanted him to have it so whenever he’s running around the United States or the world, he’ll think of Arkansas,” Miller explained.
Clinton finished the course that day in 24 minutes and 18 seconds, a respectable time for a mid-40s plodder with his athletic gifts. “I’m going to win my age and body fat divisions,” the president-elect quipped before the race. “I’ll have no competitors.”
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In 1992, Nov. 26 fell on the fourth Thursday of the month, meaning that Bill Clinton’s first Thanksgiving after being elected president fell on the same date George Washington had proclaimed the first national day of thanksgiving in 1789. GW asked his countrymen to thank the Almighty for the many blessings accorded Americans, not the least of which was throwing off Britain’s yoke and creating a new nation.
What would George Washington have thought of Bill Clinton donning running togs and participating in a road race 203 years later? I’m confident he would have approved. Washington insisted that he owed his own robust health to his habit of daily exercise, which for him often entailed rigorous horseback riding. As for the traditional Thanksgiving dinner that took place in the Little Rock governor’s mansion, I think the first president would have heartily embraced that custom as well. He liked a feast as well as the next man, and who wouldn’t be gratified that a tradition he started was going strong more than two centuries later?
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