Silicon Valley Turkey Trot hitting its stride at 15: Pizarro

In its first 14 years, the annual Thanksgiving Day race has raised more than $8.7 million for local nonprofits.

On Thursday, some people will start their Thanksgiving morning by putting a turkey in the oven. Others will switch on the TV to watch an early football game. Some will just sleep until noon. But a surprising number will dress up like a Pilgrim or a bowl of cranberry sauce and swarm downtown San Jose along with some 25,000 other people.

That’s right. The Applied Materials Silicon Valley Turkey Trot is back for its 15th year, and it’s hard to imagine how quiet downtown must have been before it arrived back in 2005.

Since the start, the race has always been about more than just burning enough calories for an extra slice of pumpkin pie. The race — the largest timed Thanksgiving Day road race in the nation — has raised more than $8.7 million for local nonprofits. Silicon Valley Leadership Group CEO Carl Guardino — who founded the race with his wife, Leslee — hopes to add $1 million to that total this year.

“It would be so much easier to raise $1 million dollars and just give it to these five charities, but we would not at all have built community,” Carl Guardino said. “We wanted to build community, help the needy and start our holiday in a fun and healthy way.”

The five charities that the race supports are Healthier Kids Foundation of Santa Clara County, The Housing Trust of Silicon Valley, the Health Trust, Second Harvest of Silicon Valley, and Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Cruz County. Participants also have brought in nearly 3 million pounds of food.

Healthier Kids Foundation CEO Kathleen King said the Silicon Valley Leadership Group Foundation has been able to fund its vision and hearing screenings for underserved youth through the race, helping more than 37,000 kids. She says she loves being out there on race morning — she runs the 5K with her son — and soaking up the energy. “Everyone is in a great mood and happy, no one is crabby,” she said. “I feel like I am running with 20,000 very good friends.”

And they’re almost all wearing Turkey Trot race shirts, which provides an unexpected boost for the race’s beneficiaries.

“I think a lot of people know about the Housing Trust because we’re on the Turkey Trot T-shirts,” said Housing Trust CEO Kevin Zwick, who’ll be running for the 12th year in what has become a Thanksgiving tradition for his family. “It really helps to raise awareness about the affordable housing crisis in the region.”

The race has a more concrete benefit for the Housing Trust, which has received $2.6 million in funding over the years. The race also directly supports the Finally Home program, which helps people move into stable housing by providing security deposits and financial assistance. Since 2014, the program has helped 2,300 people move out of homelessness.

That kind of impact is what the Guardinos were thinking of when they decided to launch the race, which owes its success to another Thanksgiving Day run, the Run to Feed the Hungry in Sacramento. They heard a radio report in 2004 about 20,000 people walking and running through the streets of the state’s capital city and wondered if that could be done in San Jose.

The first race — Applied Materials signed on as a multiyear sponsor from the start — had a goal of 1,000 runners and wound up with at least 1,900. So many people showed up to register on Thanksgiving morning that the race started 17 minutes late. “We think hundreds of people just bandited the race because we just had to start,” Guardino said.

The race continued to grow —  hitting peaks of 26,405 participants and $935,000 raised in 2010 — and even that growth was intentional. Early on, Guardino and Mike Splinter, then the CEO of Applied Materials, sat down and determined to be bigger and more generous than the Sacramento run. “They were already above 20,000, so that became the early on goal,” Guardino said. “It wasn’t bigger for bigger’s sake, but the larger we are, the more people we could help.”

The Silicon Valley Turkey Trot includes a 10K run, a 5K run/walk and kids fun runs. The race starts in waves at Santa Clara and First streets and finishes with a post-race festival at Arena Green near SAP Center. Registration is available at www.svturkeytrot.com.

In addition to the costumed folks, weekend runners and parents pushing strollers, there will be elite runners contending for more than $30,000 in prize money. Shannon Rowbury returns as the most accomplished female 5K runner in the field, coming off a victory at the USATF 5K Road Championships in New York City,  and the men’s field includes Kenyans David Bett and Lawi Lalang.

Like any success, the Turkey Trot has spawned spin-offs with the Santa Run on Dec. 15 and the Hearts & Soles Run, set for March 28, 2020. Both have been successful, but neither has reached Turkey Trot levels.

“The community has embraced it with such enthusiasm,” Guardino said. “People will come up and tell me they’ve run it 8 times, 9 times, 10 times. It gives me chills.”