The basic idea behind Front Runners & Walkers San Diego’s annual Pride run – Run and Stride with Pride – has always been to showcase the club’s contribution to the GLBT community in the context of San Diego’s yearly Pride celebration.

The run provides an additional way for community members and visitors to celebrate Pride and creates visibility and prestige for the club. This year marks the event’s 28th anniversary. Much has changed since its inception!

Club co-founder Carol Pierce proudly recalls that the club staged its first Pride run in 1982, before Front Runners San Diego was even a year old. In the early years, the event was essentially an open house: a bigger, fancier version of the usual Saturday fun run, with opening ceremony, the run or walk, and a brunch. No entrance fee was charged. About 75 people participated that first year.

For many years, close ties existed between the LA and San Diego clubs, with high attendance of each at the other’s Pride run. Carol is not the only member who recalls with some satisfaction that during those early years at LA’s event, San Diegans usually walked away with the honors!

The course for the San Diego club’s run varied over the years, but for the most part it took place in the western portion of Balboa Park. By agreement with the park authorities, roads were mostly avoided due to traffic concerns, and the course stayed on sidewalks or grass.

The first year that the Pride festival moved into its current location in Balboa Park, Front Runners was allowed to leave part of the race course along the Marston Point loop (since the race ended well before the festival began on Saturday), but the overlap caused concerns about delays in setting up for the festival and led to rerouting the course in subsequent years.

Debbie Chaddock, who joined the club in 1984 and was club co-chair in 1985, recalls efforts to make the race more attractive to serious athletes. She listed the run in Race Place for the first time in 1985 or 1986, and even though it was not a sanctioned course, runners would come for the “glorified training” because, she says, “It’s always more fun to work out with others.”

Member Bart Hopple, who also belonged to Different Strokes Swim Team, inaugurated the tradition of recruiting DSST members to monitor the course and call out split times, which Debbie believes added to the draw.

In 2005, the focus of the event changed with the certification of the course by USATF and the decision to charge a registration fee. Henceforth, the run would be a fundraiser for a charity (the Center’s Youth Housing Project), and the T-shirt would be included in the entry fee.

Deb notes that partly due to the certification and partly due to greater awareness on the part of the running community, the event increasingly attracts elite runners. To that extent, it can be said to have paralleled the overall San Diego Pride celebration in going mainstream.

For all this time, however, the run was only informally affiliated with the larger Pride organization. That changed in 2007, when the run became integrated into the official program.

This entailed moving the race course from its old haunt in Balboa Park to the parade route along University and Sixth avenues.

It also meant bowing to SD Pride’s wish for a later start time. This delay increased the risk of hot conditions for the runners but meant that more people would actually see the race, since by 10 a.m. the crowds lining the route in anticipation of the parade are already substantial.

Even before the formation of the first Front Runners club in San Francisco in 1979, the GLBT athletic movement has been a beacon of hope to gays and lesbians who seek an image of open living that entails more than bars. With its annual Pride run and its participation in Gay Games and other sports gatherings, Front Runners & Walkers San Diego continues a vibrant tradition that’s evolving with the times.