Tim Cleary, 55, presented The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Peachtree Road Race as not a choice, but rather a Cleary family requirement when he suggested his then-12-year-old son Patrick take part in the 10K.
“It wasn’t a ‘convincing,’ Patrick, now 30, said. It was a, ‘You’re waking up a 3 a.m.’”
Tim Cleary has been waking up Patrick and other members of his family long before dawn on the Fourth of July since 1990.
Tim soon became enamored with the Peachtree after the first race in 1970. As an Atlanta native and Georgia Tech graduate, Tim recalls his fascination with the 10K and the determination he had to run it only swelling over time.
He finally raced his first Peachtree in 1988 and not soon after recruited his father Jim, 79, to join him in 1990.
“There’s something about it, just to be with all the people coming down Peachtree,” Tim said. “It is fantastic.”
His sons Patrick and Michael, 22, found the event equally as mesmerizing. By 2005, 14 members of Tim’s family were running the Peachtree to celebrate Jim’s 70th birthday, a Cleary participant record.
The unpredictable change that nearly three decades brings moved everyone but Tim’s parents out of Georgia. Although the Clearys have dispersed across the southeast, the Peachtree managed to put Michael on a flight from Houston to Hartsfield-Jackson this year and will continue to send Tim and his family to Atlanta for years to come.
“It is our family reunion every year,” Tim, who now lives in Tennessee, said.
Six Clearys — Tim, Jim, Patrick, Michael, daughter Shannon, 28, and her husband James Sharkey, 27, — ran in the 2014 Peachtree on Friday, which was Tim’s 27th.
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