During their wedding weekend in September in Nantucket, Mass., Larry Giannechini, 34, and Pat Knise, 35, held many traditional activities. They staged a welcome dinner. Their wedding was at a private club with a ceremony and a reception. Brunch was the next day.
But there was another item on the agenda: a group run the morning of the wedding. “Because we are runners, and a lot of our friends are runners, we thought it would be fun,” Mr. Giannechini said of the 5K (or 3.1 miles). “We also wanted to get everyone’s blood pumping the morning of the ceremony.”
“We also wanted to diversify what we were doing so it wasn’t just socializing at a bar each day,” he added.
The couple, who live in Manhattan, rented shuttle buses to take wedding guests to Sanford Farm, a beautiful but more remote part of the island. “It’s somewhere you wouldn’t go as a tourist,” Mr. Giannechini said. “We thought we would give everyone a reason to get out there.”
Seventy-five people participated in the run — well, some walked — while another 20 showed up to cheer them on. The three fastest female runners and the three fastest male runners won prizes such as medals engraved by a local artisan, a bottle opener from the Whaling Museum, and a book by Elin Hilderbrand, a popular writer in Nantucket.
As group running has become more popular across the United States — and some couples even meet through run clubs — the trend has carried over to special occasions. People are organizing group runs for their birthdays, for team-bonding activities at work, for bachelor and bachelorette parties, and for wedding weekends.
The wedding 5K, as couples sometimes refer to it, is almost always an optional activity. Many guests cherish it as a way to meet new people at a wedding or get their steps in. Others, however, opt out or make fun of it.
Mr. Giannechini, who works for a public art fund, said guests were joking at the welcome party that they couldn’t get too drunk because there was a race to win the next day. (Mr. Knise works in private equity.)
When they attend other people’s weddings, Madeline Miller McWhorter, 30, a flight attendant, and Baxter McWhorter, 30, a medical student, always run a 5K the morning of the ceremony. “We get sweaty and then we get beautiful,” she said. They are also part of a running club in Macon, Ga., where they live.
So when the couple married in May in Atlanta, they decided to host their own 5K.
“We called the run the McWhorter Miler,” she said. The couple required guests to say whether they were taking part when they responded to the wedding invitations.
Fifty-eight out of 145 guests came; the runners all won participation trophies. “Anyone who showed up at 8 a.m. won for the day,” the bride added. For the run she wore a tank top that looked like a tuxedo, and the groom wore white shorts and a white shirt.
The only downside was that it forced the couple to see each other the morning of the wedding, which is considered by some to be bad luck. They ultimately decided it was worth the risk. “It shook out some nerves,” she said.
“I think it gave some people a reason or encouragement to be on their best behavior at the rehearsal dinner the night before because they wanted to do the race,” she added.
Some brides and grooms are running in smaller groups the morning of their weddings.
When she married on Aug. 31, in Madison, Wis., Lexi Schweinert Bowden, 26, a freelance sports reporter, went on a run with her immediate family, later saying the experience provided them all with meaningful time. “It almost felt like doing a memory trip before a new chapter begins,” she said.
For some however, a group run is a hard pass.
Sammie Britt, 29, a recruiter for a pharmaceutical and biotech company who lives in Brooklyn, was at a bachelorette party in Denver. One of the planned activities was a run of up to 13 miles.
“They did it so early in the morning, and I am not a morning person,” she said. “Also I am not a runner.”
Ms. Britt said that she and another friend went nearby to get coffee for the runners when they finished. “That was the extent of my exercise that morning,” she added.
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