Allan Appel Photo
Celeste and Felix Vandokkum offer water & hula at Station 11.
The action at Water Station No. 11, at about the tenth mile of the Faxon Law New Haven Road Race, began at around 8:15 Labor Day morning as it has for decades— with Julia and Bill Moore’s famous Texas-style grits. Except by now 200 neighbors knew to show up.
It ended about three hours later, a short distance down from the Moores’ home, at the corner of Everit Street and East Rock Road. There, Celeste and Felix Vandokkum and a bunch of other wildly enthusiastic kids doing the hula to encourage the last 20K and half marathon runners on to the conclusion of their race.
The Moores, creators of Water Station 11, & party.
The great Labor Day race marked its 39th year Monday. A tradition as old and continuous as the race itself, the festivities around Water Station No. 11 began in 1978 with only a single table and about six people having a pre-race party at the Moores’ attractive house, and then folks moseying over to the corner to offer water in cups and to see the runners.
The Moores had recently moved into the area that year. They thought having a party in connection with the race was a good way to meet the neighbors.
“It was part of our way of being new to the neighborhood,” Moore, a Yale-trained architect, recalled Monday morning as he greeted friends, including his barber,Tony Mongillo, who brought over a bag of homegrown tomatoes.
Sneaker bouquet at party, by Bonnie Byers.
Then came Linda Briggs with fresh strawberries. The doors opened again and here were people spanning generations and, it seemed just about everybody in the Moores’ life. All the food was laid out around a table arrangement featuring red carnations and other flowers growing out of a pair of sneakers.
Each new arriving guest, received an official Faxon Law New Haven Road Race long-sleeved shirt.
When all that happens you know it’s the Labor Day race, at least up in East Rock.
Ever since that first year, the Moores have kept the party going and sustained the station, gathering cadres of friends to man-and-woman the actual water offering, the raking, and the cleaning. It is the only continuous such operation in the history of the race itself, reported John Bysciewicz, the race coordinator.
Carl Gottschalk, in blue and son Gunnar in white show the technique.
The tradition includes sustained cheering, cowbells, kids dressed up in Hawaiian outfits with crane tiaras, and funny signs all to nourish the participants .
People up at Water Station No. 11 care about who wins. But, like many New Haveners, they care as much about being part of the event in all these ways as well.
This year’s 20K was won by Leonard Korir and Aliphine Tuliamuk. Click here and here to see all the results. Over 2,000 people participated in the four separate contests that took place.
Shortly before those Kenyan-born runners came into view, longtime party-goers and water station pros Molly LeVan, Carl and Maggie Gottschalk, Margy Lemere, had set up, for the first time this year, two tables.
On one side of East Rock Road stood a table for runners going the additional seven-tenths of a mile up Whitney Avenue to the Eli Whitney Museum. That was the additional little leg of the first-time half marathon, which has attracted many more amateur runners than the nationally ranked 20K.
Mateo Caliendo demonstrates his patented anti-splash technique.
On on the south side of the road a second table serviced the runners in the 20K, who were going directly to Whitney Avenue and down for what turned out to be a photo finish at the Green.
Gunnar Gottschalk, now a graduate student in neuroscience in Chicago, was home at his parents’ house for a visit. Since it was Labor Day, the was right there handing out water.
As he took his position, a phalanx of kids was in place ready to give out those cups to the runners.
Like the 39 kids whom Julia Moore and neighbors had assembled for this race, Gottschalk earned his water-offering chops handing out his first cups when he was no higher than the tables.
By now, of course, and being a scientist after all, he had the technique down.
Cup-Handing Technique Revealed
Fiddler was cheered so much by his neighbors near station 11, he was mistaken for the mayor.
At around 9:38 a.m., as the Moores’ party was in full swing — Bill Moore confessed that with his hosting and socializing duties he hadn’t himself gotten as far as the corner in years — the first group of elite runners came tearing around from the base of East Rock. Meanwhile, Gottschalk shared his cup handling insights with a reporter.
“You got to have the touch and it’s all in the grip” and release, he said.
He added that in his long experience the elite runners, who now were zooming by, were all in a kind of zone. “They’re good, they’re really really good, they’re pro’s, and they generally don’t want anything,” he said.
Of the first dozen runners, all very thin men, this reporter guesstimated that only one took the water that Gottschalk proffered. When there’s a successful hand-off to these elite runners, he said, it’s usually preceded by eye contact.
Later on, of course, as the less supersonic runners pass by and the race develops, “some will even stop,” he said. The occasional runner might even “stay for coffee,” he joked.
At 9:44 the first of the elite women runners came roaring by. True to Gottschalk’s experience, she ran on, in a zone all her own.
Several minutes later he successfully made a hand-off to another woman runner. By this time the little kids, having observed and been coached by their parents as well, were really into it. They competed with each other to see if runners “chose” them.
Few of the elite runners took water.
Little Mateo Caliendo, who lives with his family at the house on the northeast corner of the Everit/East Rock intersection, and from whose spigots the water cups were being filled, was developing an impressive anti-splash technique. As he served up water or another hydrating liquid to the passing runners, he rolled up his sleeve to avoid an occupational hazard.
That was going to be especially so as the runners were becoming increasingly numerous and even at times bunched up.
Race Coordinator Bysiewicz reported that the race provides drinking-grade hoses, the cups, tubs for the water, gloves, trash bags, and stirrers for the fluid replacement drink, which this year was UCAN berry electrolyte mix. The race also provides T‑shirts for the volunteers. (Julia Moore said she had requested 39 ‘smalls” for the kids.)
Water — & Cheers — Refresh
The volunteers — Bysiewicz said all told this year the race has about 1,000 — provide the water, and of course the equally substantial refreshment of cheering and good wishes.
The former rector of Trinity Church on the Green, Andrew Fiddler, remembered those cheers throughout the 27 races that he ran beginning in 1978 before he had to give it up on account of two hip replacements.
“Once when I was running by 15 years ago, I got lots of cheers on East Rock Road [at the water station corner]. The guy next to me said, ‘What are you, the mayor’ I had to tell the truth: ‘A neighbor.’”
Molly LeVan, who ran the 20K for years until finishing law school and having kids, was on raking duty Monday. The rakes, which are provided by the volunteers, weren’t getting much use, she said, because a group of older kids had been recruited to scoop up the discarded cups between the waves of the runners.
By around 10:10, as an American flag-bearing runner paused for a drink, some of the kids were getting a little daring.
Even though LeVan and the other volunteers had taped a line behind which the kids were to stand for safety reasons, you could tell it had become something of a competition among the little ones for a runner to take his or her proffered cup of fluid.
The parents now began coaching their children, many of whom were understandably short as they were little, how to elevate the cup to make it easier for the runners, especially the tall ones, to grasp as they tore by.
Finally, after many tries, 3‑year-old Tommy Wittenstein was successful in his hand-off. As a female runner grabbed the cup he had offered, and then drank a bit before splashing the rest over her head, he declared, to his beaming dad, “She got it!”
At 10:20 runner #389 paused the stroller he was wheeling in front of him to take a drink. He thanked the little kid who had offered him the drink.
At 10:23, #379, who appeared to be among the last runners, not only took a cup from one of the Vandokkum kids, but paused to chat.
Party host and cup picker-upper Moore toward end of the race.
Their father Peter, whose house on the south side of East Rock road provided the water for the 20K runners, praised his kids for dressing up in the Hawaiian theme this year. (It was Celeste’s idea.) But he said he was a little disappointed other people had not joined in as much as he hoped.
Still, if the costumes weren’t in evidence, silly signs were, including “Run As If You Stole Something.” The cheers and words of encouragement, along with directions like “Half marathon to the right, 20K to the left,” were sustained and sustaining.
At 10:53, with a few more runners coming in ahead of the clean-up trucks, Julie Moore was sighted greeting her friend Danny Botsman, had come up after running with the 5K with his son, and picking up a wind-blown cup.
Towards the end, there were far more cup-bearers than runners.
Peter Vandokkum said he and his daughters were going to stay to the very end, doing their hula moves and offering encouragement and water to the final runners. “The ones at the end need it the most. We try to stay and be enthusiastic for them,” he said.
Then Gunnar Gottschalk walked me back to the Moores’ house, where the party was finally winding down.
Bysiewicz said that the Moores are going to be honored next month, at a formal post-race dinner, for their “streak” of now 39 years at Water Station No. 11.