Philly runs on medals: The race bling runners can’t resist

Love Philly? So do we. Let’s be friends. Sign up for the Billy Penn newsletter today.

There’s a lot Philly runners will endure for a race medal.

Signing up for a race, downloading the Strava app, making time to train and then getting stressed they didn’t train enough. On race day, they wake up early to run an ungodly distance for a banana and a beer they try to convince themselves would have tasted worse if they just had them in their warm, cozy bed.

For many though, all of that is worth it when they get that new hardware draped around their neck after crossing the finish line.

It helps even more if the medal looks dazzling, and local designer Rita Carroll has been the one to thank for some of Philly’s most unique and memorable race medals in recent years.

Carroll, a 37-year-old UArts grad and runner herself, even races in many of the events she works. She said that seeing how people react when they get her medals can make her just as emotional.

“I’ll cry because it’s so awesome being able to see people take pride in having this tangible item after they’ve done something really physically demanding and cool,” she said. “Then it adds to their collection and this can represent having a memory anchored in that day or time.”

The founder of Out&Back Creative and Bok Runclub, Carroll has been working race operations with popular local races including the Philly 10K, the Queen of Prussia 10K, Philly Run Fest and the upcoming Philadelphia Distance Run. If you had a can of Triple Bottom Brewing’s Downhill Pils at this year’s Broad Street Run, her design was on that can as well.

Medals are not a new concept, with people getting awarded them for military, sporting or any other significant achievements as far back as the Roman Empire. The common style in sports, the one that makes you easily picture an Olympic gold medal and not the Stanley Cup or a WWE championship belt, is a design stamped or printed on a disc of metal with a strap to wear it around your neck. 

Only relatively recently has the customization of the medals beyond that simple circle become a relatively novel practice. The functioning mini Liberty Bells that we all hear on the Philadelphia Marathon medals every November weren’t introduced until the 2010s. Kathleen Titus, race director for the Philly Marathon, joked that she might lose her role if they ever stop including the bells now.

“It has to ring and you’ve got to test the bell and make sure that the little toggle on the bell doesn’t bang off when people are using it like a cowbell,” she said.

Medal design is just a small part of what Carroll does with Out&Back for races, with much of her time devoted to the other parts of the creative umbrella of the race, like the website and marketing design, the branding of the other race merchandise and materials like the bibs and course signage.

She described designing medals as a labor of love though, given how they become a tactile token people can be proud of, and how they allow her to work on a concept that captures the identity of each race.

”Everything you can touch can be a story,” she explained. “I know not everyone listens or reads the words, but I think that people do, and when they do it’s a nice invitation to just bring them into even more of a fabric.”

After Carroll started creating medals and understood the common expectations of what they should look like, she soon also got the urge to start “getting funky with it,” while “keeping a beat on the identity of the races,” she said. The Queen of Prussia 10K is a women’s race, so the medal design represents a diamond, with different cuts every year, and translucent material that makes light shine through. Philly Run Fest is inspired by a music festival, which has been represented with a record half out of its sleeve and a disco ball — both able to spin. The Philly 10K medals pay homage to South Philly’s Tofani doors that much of the race passes by, some complete with translucent material for the glass.

The medal that runners will collect for this year’s Philly Distance Run on Sept. 20 is keystone shaped, like previous years, and incorporates a compass with a spinnable dial on its face to embrace a “spirit of adventure and exploration.”

“I’ll always throw out the wildest ideas, because I think you can scale back from there,” Carroll said. “It does feel really playful and I do feel like I’m tapping into this imagination that maybe I had once when I was a kid, where you’re like, ‘Make it spin, put glitter on it, do whatever.’ Then it really does just feel fun for me, it feels fun for participants.”

She said the design process is similar to a run, and can be as frustrating sometimes. Like a long run in bad weather when you’re just pushing forward every step, hours of struggle  sitting at the drawing board are worth it when inspiration finally clicks 

“They can both be a tedious process, but when you’re in it, you’re in it,” Carroll said. “Then there’s the celebration of the output, whether it is completing something or it is kind of just like nailing a design that you just feel just great about.”