More than 2,000 turn out for races at National Infantry Museum

More than 2,000 runners turned out Saturday at the National Infantry Museum and Soldier Center for an event which might have featured the last Soldier Marathon in Columbus.

Cecil Cheves, race director, said conversations next week will include Maj. Gen. Eric Wesley, commander of the Maneuver Center of Excellence at Fort Benning, on the proposal to discontinue the 26.2 mile marathon and continue the 13.1 mile half-marathon and 3.1 mile or 5K course.

“We are going to regroup and just decide if what we are doing makes any sense,” Cheves said. “We don’t know. We want to study it and decide that this is something the community wants us to do and runners want us to do. We are volunteers and kind of put this together. We don’t want to overstay our welcome.”

The future of the full marathon was a hot topic for 500 runners taking part in the race which started and ended at the National Infantry Museum.

“What I told the runners is that we just hit the pause button,” Cheves said. “We are just going to study it and make sure if we are going to go, what direction to go. Is it something worth doing rather than just going to do it?”

A man crossed the finish line in 2 hours, 53 minutes to complete the full marathon, and the longest time was 7 hours, 20 minutes. In the half-marathon, Cheves said it was completed in 1 hour, 16 minutes. The 3.1 mile or 5K course was done in 16 minutes.

By 3:15 p.m. Saturday, Cheves said there were only a couple of marathon runners still on the course which included about 7.5 miles on Fort Benning and the rest along the Chattahoochee RiverWalk and the Phenix City Riverwalk.

“It just went beautifully,” Cheves said. “We had another outstanding race in every respect.”

In addition to the runners, Cheves said there were also about 400 volunteers and several hundred spectators for the event, pushing the total to more than 2,500 in attendance.

For the most part, he said the event went smoothly despite some early issues with the course and water for runners. “We got a little warm in the morning, and we had to recruit some more ice and water,” he said.

Soldiers are big supporters of the race, but the director noted civilians outnumber them. “We have three civilians for everyone in the military,” he said.

This story was originally published November 18, 2017 at 5:09 PM with the headline "More than 2,000 turn out for races at National Infantry Museum."