A good way to love the Coulee

I love this Coulee…the scenery, the climate, the people. It will be my home until I leave this earth. I started running in the Coulee nearly 25 years ago. The Coulee has a way of reaching into your soul to bring peace and calm. Run The Dam (formerly The Over The Dam Run) became my baby in 2016. I wanted to share the unique course and beauty of the Coulee with the whole world.

Run The Dam, now a nonprofit organization, has a mission to provide healthy outdoor activity in the Coulee. The annual event, always the third weekend of September, now boasts a vendor and food fair, motorcycle poker run, kids korner, two full days of live entertainment in the Adult Garden, and the three-distance road race across the spectacular dam and through the walls of the mighty Coulee. Additionally, the organization assists young aspiring race directors to hold events that support other nonprofit organizations, and we are currently partnering with a local city municipality to assist with the building of a community park.

But Run the Dam, and many other events can’t happen without people. The Run the Dam race alone takes at a very minimum 16 people, and several agency volunteers to provide police escort and ambulance services. Each year we struggle with the same 10 people who are forced to wear many hats. And now that our event is a two-day festival, the number of people we could really use to make it the most successful would really be more J. like 40 or more people. I realize mine is not the only event with this problem.

My wish is that more of my Coulee neighbors could find it in their hearts to offer up just a couple hours of their time to an organization’s event of their choice in our community just once a year. Can you visualize with me how great that would look?

I’d like to invite you to give RTD or any other organization in our Coulee a try. You may find that you really enjoy being on the inside of one of our many local events and may be able to help make them bigger and better than ever. I sure love it and I hope you will too.