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06/26/2024 08:30 AMThe Fourth of July is a day for fireworks, barbecues, and relaxing with family, but for at least 1,000 people, the holiday will be a day of exertion and effort.
The reward for all that effort? Maybe it’s a good race time, but in any case, the fun of participating in the Chester Rotary’s Four on the Fourth Road Race is more than enough of a reward. Proceeds from the entrance fee for the race support the ongoing community projects of the Chester Rotary.
Emily Werwaiss Duffy will be one of those runners. Her best time is 37 minutes, but these days, it usually takes her somewhere in the 40-minute range.
“It’s not the time. It’s the fun,” she says. “Anything under 40 is a bonus.”
The race not only goes through the relatively flat terrain of downtown Chester, but it also makes its way up and down the hills in the center of town.
For Emily, the most challenging part of the race is a hill at the end, Straits Road.
“It’s gradual, but it’s long. Deceptively hard,” she says.
Regardless of how they do on the hills, all the runners can count on receiving a T-shirt. Each year, the shirt is an original which includes the iconic Chester Squirrel somewhere in its design. The squirrel was first created by the late Peter Good.
Along with the Chester Squirrel, this year’s T-shirt features another one of Good’s iconic designs: the logo for the Hartford Whalers. Although the hockey team left the state more than 25 years ago and recreated itself as the Carolina Hurricanes, the Whalers’ logo T-shirts continue to be among the National Hockey League’s top sellers.
This year’s race T-shirt was designed by Jan Cummings, Peter Good’s wife and longtime partner as an artist and graphic designer.
Emily, who lives in Chester, was wearing an old race T-shirt on the day she met with a reporter. She’s received many of them after having ran the race over 20 times. However, she does not, as some people do, keep the T-shirts as souvenirs. They are wardrobe items.
“I wear them, so they wear out,” she says.
At the age of 10, Emily went to the road race for the first time, riding her bicycle from her home in Ivoryton with her father, Willie Werwaiss. She thinks the first time she ran the race herself was either as a senior in high school or a freshman in college.
Emily does not run alone, and that is not simply because of the crush of other participants. Her husband, Dan Duffy, has run the race, as has his son Jim, who once a sportswriter for Shore Publishing and is now an attorney.
Jim once wrote a column for the Valley Courier on his first Four on the Fourth experience, having completed the race with a time of some 45 minutes. Jim wrote about training to beat his father, although he did not that year and, like many other runners, he worried about finishing last. He did not do that, either.
This year Jim, his wife Liz, and their three children—Danielle, Seamus, and Fiona—will run in the race. It will be the first time for Fiona, who is 6. Last year, she was too young to run.
Emily has also run half-marathons and was a member of a Master’s Swim Club, once going to Lake George for a 3-mile swim.
“That’s the water equivalent of a half-marathon,” she explains.
After graduating from Oberlin College with a major in political science, Emily had planned a career in politics. She worked for a gubernatorial primary in Virginia and worked as a legislative aide to Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim.
Emily met Dan, who worked in the State Capitol, through politics, although she remains unsure if they first met in Hartford or at parallel conferences they were attending in Las Vegas.
Emily says that Ganim gave assistants the opportunity to volunteer as mentors for young people without having to take time off to do so. It led to a career change for her.
“I realized I loved school,” she says.
Coupled with that, there was was another realization about the speed of change.
“I went into politics to make a difference, but the wheels grind slowly,” she says.
Emily went back to school herself for a master’s degree in education. She did her student teaching in Chester and Essex and taught in special education for 12 years at Essex Elementary School, where she herself had once been a student.
“I taught with teachers who had taught me,” she says.
For the past two years, Emily has been a learning specialist at Franklin Academy in East Haddam, a college preparatory boarding school for students with autism spectrum disorder level 1.
There is a ritual which Emily and her family follow for Four on the Fourth. They get to the race early.
“We don’t want to be stressed,” she says.
They like to run in the middle of the pack.
“We don’t want to slow fast runners, and we like to be carried by the crowd,” she adds.
Every year, they have the same breakfast before the race: half a cup of coffee and half a peanut butter sandwich.
When it’s over, Emily says the best thing is going to the beach for a plunge in the water.
And maybe eating the other half of the peanut butter sandwich.
For information on Four on the Fourth, go to: portal.clubrunner.ca/7772.