I enjoy reading about various activities, whether people write about vacations they’ve been on, chess tournaments they’ve participated in, even interesting trips to the hardware store. I’ll kick this off with something I did last weekend: The Shawshank Hustle.
A good friend of mine from grad school (now in Georgia) actually told me about it. It’s a 4.6 mile race held in Mansfield, OH, starting and ending at the Ohio State Reformatory. What makes this interesting is that this is where they filmed The Shawshank Redemption. This year is the 25th anniversary of that film and the 5th anniversary of the race, which made this–as the website says, at least–“the must-do event of the summer!”.
So my friend flew up for the weekend so that we could participate in this event. We headed to Mansfield Friday afternoon to take part in the reformatory tour that was part of the admission fee. This was pretty cool.
The outside actually looked much nicer than I expected, almost like a Disney-fied version of a prison:
Inside, we got to see an electric chair, which spooked me out more than I would have guessed:
As for the rest of the inside, there was a surprisingly-large church (chapel?):
And LOTS of cells. These were very small:
Overall, very interesting tour with one SIGNIFICANT negative. Towards the end of the tour, we bump into a large group of serious people. At the middle is our fuckwit governor:
Very unpleasant - I had the same expression as the girl on the left. Didn’t heckle him, which was a failure on my part.
Anyway, had an uneventful dinner at Buffalo Wild Wings that night and an uneventful race. But the real positive here (and the reason my friend wanted to travel to Ohio in the first place) was the finishers medal:
The back:
The front:
But wait, it opens:
And the pickaxe comes out!:
Overall, the medal made the trip totally worthwhile. A+ event. Would run again.
