“Life is short, your heels shouldn’t be!”

For a decade, the Queen City Race for Life and Street Strut keeps proving this mantra to be true, especially for today’s runners who support breast cancer awareness and local cancer survivors.

Saturday morning’s event, centered at Dumont Plaza in downtown Meridian, featured a five kilometer walk/run, one-mile fun run, a high heel dash and the famous street strut with fancy, handcrafted umbrellas. Almost 250 participants came out in support of the event. In addition, hundreds of Meridian Community College and community members showed up to offer their cheers and support.

Cindy Kane Schrock, an MCC alumna, along with Phyllis Holladay, advisor for MCC’s Nu Upsilon chapter of Phi Theta Kappa, joined forces for this fundraiser, which collects money for the Anderson Cancer Patient Benevolence Fund. The race raised approximately $10,000 to help cancer patients who may need assistance with expenses not covered by insurance.

The fund was created to help local cancer patients with anything from transportation assistance, medical assistance, lymph edema supplies, prosthetics, and durable medical equipment.

Schrock said she partnered with PTK 10 years ago to honor her sister who succumbed to breast cancer.

“PTK members had hosted a Street Strut with the colorful umbrellas; they had seen an umbrella strut elsewhere and thought this would be a fun activity,” Holladay said.

Fast forward to 2019. Holladay emphasized: “This week has been busy, but we could not have done it without our sponsors and all of the volunteers who donate their time to coordinate this race.”

Kelsey Harris and Alexis Thornton joined their boss, Charles Frazier of Weidmann’s restaurant, to participate in the race. Even after a long shift the night before, Harris said she enjoys running for a healthy life, but she feels good knowing her run benefits someone in need.

In addition to medals for the winners, the event honored the Longest Living Survivors, Meridianites Betty Phillips and Lisa Howell, as well as the Most Recent Survivor, Pamela Miles, also of Meridian, who received her diagnosis on July 27, 2019.

William Bracken was the 5K run winner; R. Mitchell took first place for the 5K walk. Eighth grader Cale Carson won first place in the mile fun run and Johnnie Bradford placed first in the mile walk. All times can be found at Time2Run.net.