Elkanah Kibet winning 2015 TD Bank Reedy River Run 10K.
During the mid-1970s, many young leaders in Greenville began looking for ways to bring some fun and energy back to downtown Greenville. Cleveland Park had just been revitalized, complete with more than three miles of paved trails. And one of several public-private efforts had successfully created Heritage Green by re-landscaping the area surrounding the County Library (now home of our new Children's Museum), the Greenville County Art Museum, and the Little Theatre.
Gally Gallivan, one of those up-and-coming Greenville leaders, was both a South Carolina National banking executive and a Greenville Track Club runner. Gally and his SCN colleagues approached Adrian Craven about the idea of starting a 10K race that would run along the Reedy River through Cleveland Park. With SCN's generous financial backing, Adrian quickly won approval from the five-year-old Greenville Track Club to produce and manage the first Reedy River Run in the spring of 1978.
In the mid 1970s, after Frank Shorter's stellar Olympic performances in Munich (1972) and Montreal (1976), the first running boom in the U.S. hit full stride. The 1970s and the early 1980s pre-dated any above-the-table corporate sponsorships of star athletes. When the first Reedy River Run's starting gun sounded at Heritage Green, the European-style running club "farm system" for recognizing new talent was still prevalent. Anyone who wanted to become the next Frank Shorter or Bill Rodgers or Alberto Salazar usually ran first for a strong metropolitan running club in hopes of attracting the attention of athletically oriented companies, such as Athletic Attic, that could at least provide shoes and apparel to the most promising road runners. As a result of this dynamic, the larger running clubs in the U.S. held high proportions of incredibly good runners.
Although a number of prominent road races existed in the southeast, such as the Greenville News Run Downtown 10K (yes, it too was a 10K at one time), the Cooper River Bridge 10K Run, the Charlotte Observer 10K, and Atlanta's Peachtree 10K Road Race, there were, overall, very few races in the early 1970’s. Nearly all of the aforementioned events began in the mid-to-late 1970s, most within a few months of Shorter's 1976 Olympic Marathon. These fledgling races had no other competition from small town 5Ks or big town, charity-oriented events for feet. They were "the" places to be. This meant that every serious runner in the Southeast showed up for The Reedy.
Plus, Adrian and the other founding members of the Greenville Track Club were in regular contact with all of GTC's sister clubs throughout the Southeast. Through those club contacts and through GTC's own traveling teams, Adrian was able to attract the 'cream of the crop' to Greenville. GTC teams traveled together to those other major cities, and those cities' clubs would more than happy to reciprocate. The competition was both friendly and fierce.
From year one, The Reedy was a featured 10K event on the Racing South Magazine road racing circuit. It also had the blessing of the USA Track & Field organization and became USATF's South Carolina 10K state championship.