Bangor Labor Day race celebrating 45th anniversary Monday

The Bangor Labor Day 5-mile road race will celebrate its 45th birthday Monday, and will run into the record books in the process.

With a snowstorm wiping out this spring’s Boys and Girls Club 5-miler in Portland, the Queen City’s traditional end-of-the-summer event will become Maine’s current longest continuously run road race.

The Boys and Girls Club race, traditionally held every Patriots Day, had been running for 77 consecutive years.

Monday’s Bangor race will start at 9 a.m. at the Bangor Parks and Recreation Building on Main Street, with registration starting at 7:30.

A lot of people have to make strong contributions for a race to keep going and going for more than four decades, and like any successful road race, it starts at the top.

“It takes the cooperation of the Police Department [and] the Bangor Parks and Recreation Department,” said race director Skip Howard. “That’s foremost why the race is successful, particularly now that the fields are larger.”

The work the police do is essential, with the first two miles winding through busy downtown streets and the final mile breezing down a fairly busy Buck Street and back onto Main Street.

“To have the intersections staffed and being able to run the race all the way through town on the main drag, that’s a key to a successful race,” Howard said.

The runners are another thing that has made this race successful. While the fields aren’t as large as they were back in the 1970s and 1980s -Howard said the race averaged more than 200 runners per year back then – they feature a solid mix of competitive runners from the Bangor area. Defending champ Adam Goode is one of those competitive runners and Howard said he is “90 percent sure” that Goode will be running, as well as others who could be vacationing here or have family members in the area.

“We still have a corps of dedicated runners who come to it,” Howard said.

He pointed out that other key support for the annual race have been the Sub 5 running club and the Bangor community.

“It’s absolutely essential to have the city on board and to have them support the race,” Howard said. “It’s been around long enough that its been a fabric of the community. I know its something the Parks and Recreation [Department] puts a lot of time into.”

Four of the course’s five miles are fairly routine, but the middle mile is anything but.

After a flat-and-downhill start on Main Street and a flat jaunt through downtown Bangor, dreaded Holland Street comes into play, reminiscent of the Boston Marathon’s Heartbreak Hill, in terms of the point in the race where it falls.

“That quirk in the race, it keeps it from being just another road race, it throws in a little gut-wrenching cross-country race in the middle of things,” Howard said.

Other than that, runners always enjoy the course through the streets of a historic city, which passes by two significant landmarks in the final 11/2 miles: author Stephen King’s house on West Broadway and the Paul Bunyan Statue.

The statue has traditionally reminded runners that the finish line is near.

“We’ve had some great finishers there, it has a lot of significance running past the statue,” Howard said.

Howard added that he hopes to see between 125-150 runners in the field.

The entry fee is $10, and those who haven’t signed up yet may log onto www.sub5.com to procure a registration form, or sign up on race day at the Parks and Rec. building 7:30-8:45 a.m.