Final Leg Wrap Up

By Jeramey Miller

Well I had an amazing time in New Jersey.  All the officers involved were great to run with.  We put in a lot of miles last week spreading the awareness of how important Special Olympics is and how important the athletes are to each and every one of us.  Here’s a little recap on the last couple of days.

Saturday we traveled to Princeton and ran through the college, where we had a nice reception from the students and faculty that were still in class. From there, we went to the home office of Special Olympics New Jersey. It was a beautiful complex complete with basketball courts, tennis courts, and beautiful gardens. We had breakfast and then a little down time. We then traveled to Mercer Airport and greeted the athletes coming in on the Cessna Airlift.

That was awesome because every 90 seconds a Cessna jet would land and taxi up with athletes onboard. We were there a little over an hour and was able to greet a lot of athletes. From there we traveled to the College Of New Jersey and did a run through the campus similar to the one at UT Arlington. There we greeted the New Jersey team arrival, and then went and ate lunch with them. That was all we had for running that day, we left the college and traveled to Green Acres Country club for the Final Leg Reception. That was a nice dinner with all the runners and coordinators and support team members. There we received a very special gift and were all awarded our very own Final Leg Torch.

Sunday was another busy day; we traveled to the Prudential Center in Newark for the Opening Ceremonies rehearsal. We were told that we will be walking in our state for the parade of athletes. That evening was the Opening Ceremonies. I thought they were excellent. The program was very well put together, and will be aired on FOX Sports 1 on June 30.

We had a documentation team traveling with us everywhere we went and took approximately 10,000 pictures of the entire week. If you would like to see the pictures of everything you can go to http://letrphotos.smugmug.com, I was running in Route 1. I truly enjoyed all of this experience and would encourage anyone that wants to experience something amazing to go. I will not sugar coat anything it is a lot of running, long days and short nights. If given the opportunity to do this again I will jump on it.