Who Let the Girls Out meets Girls on the Run

PALMER— The city of Palmer burst with activity during the annual Who Let the Girls Out event, bringing local businesses together, featuring a two-day bonanza of shopping specials and other events like the ever growing Who Let the Runners out fun run, an event created for women that recently added co-ed and children races.

“I think it’s great they opened it up,” Women’s 5K racer Diane Firmani said.

Put on by the Mat-Su Running Club, the fun run now has three different sets, a 1K children’s race, a 5K co-ed race and the staple women’s 5K race.

This is Firmani’s third year participating in the fun run. She said that the main pull that keeps her coming back is reuniting with familiar faces.

“I get to see all my gal pals,” Firmani said.

This annual event created to support local women who have businesses in Palmer has become ingrained with the city’s culture, now as much a part of the community’s internal calendar as events like Colony Days. Firmani said there was plenty of “good vibes” to go around.

“It’s got that Palmer flavor,” Firmani said.

It’s something that many people look forward to each year, drawing a lot of traffic each year, according to Women’s 5K racer, Rhonda Dunlap.

“It’s huge. It brings a bunch of people here,” Dunlap said.

At the heart of every Who Let the Girls weekend is girl power, or woman power depending on the time and place. Both girl power and woman power came together at the same place at the same time when bright green shirts entered the crowd, waiting for the 5K.

Students and teachers from Big Lake Elementary School teamed up for this year’s fun run, all of them garbed in green to pay tribute to the school’s newly adopted program, Girls on the Run, a 10 week athletic program for girls. The program doesn’t stop at athletics, first grade teacher Kirsten Wight said.

“It teachers girls how to be positive, see the best in themselves and see the best in others,” Wight said.

She said it’s more than a running club, teaching social and emotional learning in the curriculum. The school took it on about seven weeks ago and is currently the only one in the Valley. She said it fosters a lot of peer to peer interaction with plenty of opportunities for personal growth along the way.

“It’s extremely valuable for the girls in the community. They start learning how to be kinder to one another and it also gives them a great support group and it teaches them how to tackle things like bullying and gossiping, all these things that girls are going to encounter at some point of their lives,” Wight said.

Wight said the Who Let the Girls out was a fitting way to get the Girls on the Run, and a “great way to help kick off the weekend.”

Contact Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman reporter Jacob Mann at jacob.mann@frontiersman.com