One of the final activities affiliated with the 2nd Annual One City Marathon occurred last week as Deer Park Elementary School and Huntington Middle School were officially named the 2016 Nautical Mile School Champions! The Nautical Mile School Champion contest was created as a way of encouraging physical activity and school pride among the youth across the city. The contest encouraged local public and private schools to compete against each other by registering the highest percentage of their student enrollment for each year’s fun run held during the One City Marathon weekend. The contest was a great complement to the “Marathon Mania” running and literacy program sponsored by Newport News Parks, Recreation and Tourism’s Youth Programs, which was responsible for over 600 participants in this year’s fun run.

Deer Park had a total of 55 identified runners in the Nautical Mile to win the Elementary School level. Huntington won the Middle School competition with 19 Nautical Milers and two Maritime 8K runners. Each school was presented a winner’s banner to display in their building. Both Deer Park and Huntington are repeat winners from the inaugural campaign and the schools are looking forward to the challenge of “three-peating” in 2017. But other schools are also gearing up to take their title! A special congratulations goes out to Health and Physical Education teachers Trey Harris of Deer Park and Brandei Wills of Huntington for their leadership.

The One City Marathon is helping to build a new generation of healthy residents as nearly 1,100 runners of all ages took part in the Nautical Mile Fun Run this year. This was an increase of over 36% from the inaugural event in 2015.