Mike Baleno didn’t intend to run a mile and a half Saturday morning, but that’s exactly what happened at the Ironkids Fun Run held at Thunder Mountain High School.<\/p>\n
Baleno of the Buffalo, New York, area visited Juneau for Ironman Alaska and found himself completing laps around the high school track with his children, 9-year-old Jimmy and 12-year-old Ali.<\/p>\n
“It was too hard to resist,” Mike Baleno said with a grin. Plus, he said, his kids wanted him to.<\/p>\n
The Balenos were far from the only kids to put Saturday morning cartoons on hold for a weekend. Event organizers said 356 children participated in the untimed, fun run events, which included a toddler trot, half-mile and 1-mile runs.<\/p>\n
That total undersells the crowd that gathered at TMHS as it omits the throngs of adults who showed up to support fun-runners, volunteers who helped manage the event, race staff and University of Alaska Southeast mascot Spike the Whale, who led participants in calisthenics before their runs.<\/p>\n
Participants included a blend of local faces like 9-year-old Austin Treston, who finished first in his group’s 1-mile run, and visiting youths whose adults were competing in Sunday’s big event, like 17-year-old Keaton Jones of Phoenix and 14-year-old Dylan Walerius of Sylvania, Ohio, who finished in first and second place respectively in their 1-mile run.<\/p>\n
Both were first-timers to Juneau.<\/p>\n
“It’s been nice so far,” Walerius said while catching his breath following the run. “Lots of beautiful scenery.”<\/p>\n
• Contact Ben Hohenstatt at (907)308-4895 or bhohenstatt@juneauempire.com. Follow him on Twitter at @BenHohenstatt.<\/em><\/p>\n See photos from the Ironkids Fun Run below. <\/strong><\/ins><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Despite the rain, Ironkids weren’t rusty. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":474,"featured_media":89886,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":9,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,4,6],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-89885","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-home","category-news","category-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89885","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/474"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=89885"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89885\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/89886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89885"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=89885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}