No Amazing Race of Highland Co. this year

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After it resulted in $62,500 in donations to local non-profit and charitable organizations the past five years, the Amazing Race of Highland County will not be held this year, event organizer Dr. DJ Jamieson said.

“It was fun. We did it for five years and made some great friends and had a fun time doing it,” Jamieson said. “I just don’t have the time to do it. It took a lot of work getting the challenges together and I just can’t put the time into it that it deserves. It’s nothing bad about anybody or anything like that. I feel bad about it, but I don’t want to do something halfway.”

Jamieson said he will be spending a lot of time this summer traveling with his daughter, Kristin Jamieson, who will be a senior at Hillsboro High School this fall and has committed to playing golf after high school at Ohio State University, to golf tournaments in Texas, California, South Carolina, Tennessee and Alabama among other locations.

DJ Jamieson also said the event never quite took took off like he hoped it would. He said he has participated in similar events at other places that continued to grow after their inception, but that wasn’t happening in Hillsboro. The event based at Liberty Park had 85 teams the first year in 2013, 112 the second year, 108 the two years after that, then just 92 a year ago.

The August race typically covered around 4.5 miles through Liberty Park, the Southern State Community College campus and the Highland County YMCA, plus had 20 road blocks, or obstacles where teams had to complete a task like riding through an obstacle course in a wheelchair, swimming with an inner tube through a creek, crawling through mud or answering questions, before they could move forward on the course.

Local non-profit and charitable organizations manned the road blocks and each one received a $500 donation in return. A year ago 23 organizations benefited from the race.

Jamieson said he had some sleepless nights while deciding whether or not to have the race this year. While he eventually decided against it, he did not completely rule out having it again at some point.

“Maybe we’ll do it again. I don’t know,” he said. “The numbers have been going down the last couple years. We’ll see.”

Reach Jeff Gilliland at 937-402-2522 or [email protected].

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By Jeff Gilliland

[email protected]

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