Henry Molski

hmolski@enquirer.com

Julie Isphording has run in more races than she can count.

She won the Los Angeles Marathon in 1990. A Cincinnati native, she's won her hometown's Thanksgiving Day Race 12 times. Now, she's managed the charity race for 12 years.

Yet Isphording hasn't slept since Thursday's event, as she contemplates changes to next year's race.

"It's 2 a.m. in the morning and I can't shake the thought of watching people steal food," Isphording said. "People were stealing food, cussing kids out and one threw a box at me. They threw it right in my face."

The Thanksgiving Day Race is one of the longest running road races in the United States. For 105 years, Cincinnatians have been running through downtown on the morning before turkey feasts at home.

Every year the numbers have grown. The 2014 run had more than 15,000 participants. Money raised from the event goes to 12 local charities that range from the Ronald McDonald House to the Alzheimer's Association of Greater Cincinnati.

After running 10 kilometers, participants are greeted with energy bars, granola bars, yogurt, bagels, fruit and more. There's always enough to go around from first finisher to the last. In fact, there's often so much that the extras are packed up and donated to the Freestore Foodbank.

Not this year.

"There were people jumping in dumpsters..."

Thanksgiving Day was nearly a perfect day for runners.

The temperature was a bit low, right around freezing at the start, but skies were clear and the roads were dry.

"The course was clean, the water stop was beautiful and we had a gorgeous 25-minute start line," Isphording said. "It was a perfect day."

Isphording said the things she worries about most on race day are usually the health of runners. One Thanksgiving she recalls sitting in the emergency room with a man who had a heart attack in the middle of the race. She still remembers hugging the man's wife when she showed up.

"The day is about friends and family," Isphording said.

But what happened this year is haunting Isphording.

Early finishers of the Thanksgiving Day Race on Thursday wanted more of the post-race snacks than their hands and arms could hold.

Workers from Pure Protein came to pass out small, tissue-box-sized boxes of about four samples of their energy bars on Saturday. They were encouraging runners to take one of the small boxes. People took these and then some.

Isphording and other finishers saw people filling these small boxes with treats from every station to which they could hustle. When those small boxes were full, they looked elsewhere.

"There were people were jumping in dumpsters to find bigger boxes," Isphording said. "I couldn't believe it. People brought bags of their own just so they could stuff them full."

After the plundering of the post-race snack zone, many finishers fled as fast as they finished. They didn't leave much behind.

"All that was left was liquid," Isphording said. "There wasn't any food left for the walkers."

The Freestore Foodbank became a distant afterthought.

Liz Harvey, of Hebron, participated in the race and wrote a letter to The Enquirer on Friday that detailed her own account of the post-race raid.

"Everywhere I looked the boxes were getting bigger," Harvey said. "Some were having trouble carrying their full boxes that were now overflowing. I was completely disgusted by this display of greed, made worse by the irony that this was a day to give thanks and remember those less fortunate."

Dozens of runners shared similar thoughts with Harvey and with The Enquirer.

"I'm shocked by the growing amount of entitlement I see now," Isphording says. "I watched this happen on Thursday and then see similar things happen with people knocking others over just to save a few hundred dollars on a television on Black Friday."

'I've thought about resigning'

"I spent eight months out of the year preparing for this event," Isphording said. "I've thought about resigning."

Isphording said she still hasn't had a Thanksgiving dinner. She's been too upset.

She thinks the honor system in place for years at the run may be a thing of the past.

"Operationally we've done something wrong," Isphording said. " We're going to have to streamline the whole system. We're not going to be able to use high school students anymore. They weren't able to stop the people stealing the food."

Isphording has been on the phone constantly since the event. She's talked at length with her close friend, Doug Olberding, about what steps to take in 2015. Olberding volunteered at the Thanksgiving Day Race and is on the board of the organization that runs the Flying Pig Marathon.

Isphording says the Flying Pig has never had a problem like this. But she noted that marathon is much smaller in comparison - and the participants were much more tired.

Olberding and Isphording came with short-term solutions that include the removal of young volunteers, stricter boundaries around and behind tables and only allowing people through the distribution area once, akin to the Flying Pig finish line.

The event is meant to encourage giving and thanks, Isphording stresses. "We're always just trying to maximize what we give to the charities," she said

"We can only hope that those people went straight to the Freestore Foodbank with that food," Isphording said.

Donate to the Freestore Foodbank.