by Emmy Roos

What is more virtuous than getting up before dawn to breath the fresh morning air and start off the day with a run through the Reno, Nevada desert area during the ANS Winter meeting? Well, quite honestly, I can think of a few things, but that didn’t seem to be the case for our twenty-four brave runners who showed up at the Hilton hotel lobby on Tuesday morning, November 13th to take part in the NA YGN Fun Run.

This run was a big success from an organizational point of view, because we ended up with one MORE runner than we started off with. How’s that for increasing ANS membership? It also marked the inaugural NA-YGN T-shirt Exchange. The “fee” for runners entering the race was the donation of a t-shirt – the first runners back had their choice of t-shirts! To sweeten the deal, a few NA-YGN t-shirts were thrown into the mix by the NA-YGN officers! As usual, the first ones to finish were disqualified for trying to hard. This time, the poor souls were Eric Loewen from INEEL in the men’s race, while Eric’s spouse, Jennifer Loewen, was the first lady to cross the finish line. There is way-too-much ambition in this marital relationship!

As usual we also asked our participants a few questions. More specifically, we inquired about the number of members NA YGN had at the time of the race, and whether the participants knew what NA YGN stands for. The answers to those questions heavily influenced the final time and ranking in the race. For the record, NA YGN stands for North American Young Generation in Nuclear, and we had 382 members the day of the race. All except one runner underestimated our membership level. I hope we hereby pleasantly surprised most of you. The one person who overestimated, Andy Klein (Oregon State), very optimistically put our membership at 10,004. Needless to say, that made Andy the official winner of the race. Kim Kearfott (Univ. of Michigan), is the winner amongst the ladies. The fact that there were only two women in the race (let’s do better next time ladies!) and the other lady was disqualified for finishing first, can definitely be considered a weighting factor. On the other hand, Kim did receive some bonus points for her bright red “christmassy” running outfit she wore that day. Congratulations to both winners!

Finally, I would like to introduce a new concept: the NA YGN fun run honorary winner. The race director reserves the right to grant this award arbitrarily to any of the participants. This year, the honorary award goes to John Graham, who originally started the fun runs and organized them for 20 years. For those of you who wonder whether the race director is guilty of nepotism – John Graham being my husband – I can only say: Define the meaning of “is”. Or is that a U.S. Presidential prerogative?