You see teachers running around SAS all day long, but last month 90 faculty members were among the thousands of professional and amateur runners who joined the annual JP Morgan Corporate Challenge Run. Although sometimes it seems as if teachers only teach, this run showed us that our teachers are amazing athletes as well.
This 5k run stretched from the esplanade bridge all the way into the CBD and across the F1 pit building at Marina Bay. Although the faculty team was bigger than any of our varsity teams at school, they were a tiny group among the 16,000 other runners coming from corporations and institutions from all around Singapore.
The JP Morgan Run is an international non-profit charity race that donates to several different beneficiaries, depending on the host city. The Singapore race donates to a U.S. based charity called “Operation Smile” that provides free surgeries for children born with facial deformities such as cleft lips. This year’s donation fund reached over $800,000 SGD.
Like most conventional races, the winner of the run is the first across the finish line, but there is also competition for the fastest overall team and even the largest team present. Andrew Tewsley, a high school math teacher, said that “some large corporations even threaten their employees by deducting the cost of the race ($59.95 per runner) from their monthly salary to ensure maximum attendance at the event.”
This wasn’t the case for our school, but faculty who attended the race received the highly sought after SAS JP Morgan Run team shirt.
This run is a rare occasion when teachers, admin, aids, and custodians can get away from their professional lives and have fun together in a completely different environment. It’s not every day we see our superintendent, Dr. Chip Kimball, out of his work clothes and in a SAS team uniform. Some joined the race to have a leisurely run with friends, but others, such as Mr. Tewsley and his wife Erin Tewsley, competed to get a fast time. Our very own kindergarten teacher, Annika Ferrell, placed second in the women’s overall, ranking with a speedy timing of 22:27.
“The start of the race is always the most memorable – for good and bad reasons. It is a HUGE crowd as you saw, so waiting in that big mob for 30 minutes has in the past been very hot, and frustrating in such close quarters with lots of other sweaty people,” Tewsley recalled.
Our school prides itself on its abundance of sports, activities, and clubs available to the SAS community. Whenever it’s time for IASAS or Culcon, our school always gets pumped up for our Eagle athletes, performers, and debaters. But the SAS community not only consists of students, but also the large faculty ranging from teachers, aides, admin and security guards. These corporate events remind us that faculty also build our SAS pride, and the next time they run, we should be out there supporting our fellow Eagles!
