Some couples choose to kick off their big day with a group 5K. Sometimes guests join them.
During their wedding weekend in September in Nantucket, Mass., Larry Giannechini, 34, and Pat Knise, 35, held many traditional activities. They staged a welcome dinner. Their wedding was at a private club with a ceremony and a reception. Brunch was the next day.
But there was another item on the agenda: a group run the morning of the wedding. “Because we are runners, and a lot of our friends are runners, we thought it would be fun,” Mr. Giannechini said of the 5K (or 3.1 miles). “We also wanted to get everyone’s blood pumping the morning of the ceremony.”
“We also wanted to diversify what we were doing so it wasn’t just socializing at a bar each day,” he added.
The couple, who live in Manhattan, rented shuttle buses to take wedding guests to Sanford Farm, a beautiful but more remote part of the island. “It’s somewhere you wouldn’t go as a tourist,” Mr. Giannechini said. “We thought we would give everyone a reason to get out there.”
Seventy-five people participated in the run — well, some walked — while another 20 showed up to cheer them on. The three fastest female runners and the three fastest male runners won prizes such as medals engraved by a local artisan, a bottle opener from the Whaling Museum, and a book by Elin Hilderbrand, a popular writer in Nantucket.