Before there was a Boston Marathon, there was the Buffalo Turkey Trot. America’s oldest fowl-themed event is also its oldest continuously run foot race.
For the record, the Buffalo race is not to be confused with the long-running annual race of actual turkeys, held in Cuero, Texas. (In 2000, I edited a funny kids’ novel inspired by that fowl-oriented event which is still in print.)
Founded in 1896, six months before the gun went off in Hopkinton for the first marathon in Boston, the Buffalo Turkey Trot has been held every single year since, through thick and thinnest of thin, including two World Wars and both the flu and Covid pandemics.
Founded to benefit the local YMCA, the race is still a major fundraising event for that organization. Begun with six runners, two of whom didn’t make it the full five miles, today’s 128th edition is capped at 14,000 runners and is expected to raise over $300,000.
If the Buffalo race is the granddaddy of them all, it has countless offspring in cities and burgs throughout the land. By far the biggest collective running event in the country, turkey trots draw over 1 million participants each year. For all of us, turkey trots have become a Thanksgiving-morning family tradition, sharpening appetites of young and old alike for the feasting that follows.
Through the years, I have participated in many iterations of turkey trotting. Without question my favorites are the homemade variety, where you set out with friends and family to huff and puff before sitting down and getting stuffed. One of my most memorable was back in college when I was spending a Thanksgiving with my Maine roommate’s family. On a crisp drizzly day he and his brother and I plodded our way through the vicious XC trail of the local college where his dad was baseball coach, and then luxuriated in the empty showers and sauna for far longer than we ran.
Another was a sub-freezing trot just last year, when my running bud and I scampered up and down the utility roads at a Catskill ski mountain, dueling freezing blasts in our faces from snowmaking equipment as the ski mountain tried to get a head start on the snow pack for the season.
Turkey trots: a key ingredient to the holiday most associated with cooking and feasting.
Gobble gobble.
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