![]() We were really giving ourselves a lot of extra miles.” Nobody had watches to know what distance it was. “We always counted it as 10, but it was closer to 9. “We left at Lincoln and would run the Westward Ho loop,” Scott says. ![]() When Scott started with them, they just guessed how far each loop was based on time. The group still meets, some of the same faces, some new ones. They ran loops to Harrisburg, loops around the battleship and then the bike path back to the high school, loops to Falls Park. Scott kept coming back, and that group at Lincoln, running every Saturday and Sunday, and some again on Wednesday evenings, became his core of friends, his training partners, liner notes in his logs for the next 18 years. Scott went, and the group ran a 14-mile loop to Harrisburg and back. Brian Brinkman was working and told him about a group that left from Lincoln High School on weekend mornings. He was looking for a group to run with, so he went to Peak Performance and asked around. He grew up in Indiana and went to school in North Carolina, and then he took a job in Sioux Falls. It wasn’t for us – we know what he’s meant to this community. “It was a little overwhelming,” Scott, 52, says. ![]() This weekend, nearly 50 people came to an open house to say good-bye, a sort of who’s who of long-time distance running in Sioux Falls. He’s moving back to Indiana this week, and we sat down to talk about what it’s meant to him to live here, to run with friends all over this city, to lead the club and to leave a legacy of trail running and friendship. There’s something about him that’s sort of always laughing, and he’s both heartbreakingly sincere and a little oblivious all the time.įor the past 18 years, he’s been the leader of the Sioux Falls Area Running Club, a local nonprofit that puts on the Newton Hills Trail Race, the Kids Cross-Country Series, the Run for Food and the Thursday night trail runs at Good Earth State Park. Scott Walschlager is always himself – he looks like a long-legged, slightly greying praying mantis, with a wry smile and the smallest bit of vocal fry when he talks. ![]()
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