Pittsburgh Running Creates New Wedding Business

I’ve attended a wine themed wedding were I sat at the “Merlot” table while my parents sat at the “Chianti” table.

I’ve also attended a Las Vegas themed wedding with magicians, high wire acts and Elvis himself.

Why not a running themed wedding, especially on Pittsburgh Marathon weekend?

Melissa Harmon agreed and has started PR’d in Love, a business coordinating running themed weddings.  For non-runners,  a “PR” stands for personal record: any time you run a distance faster than you’ve ever ran one before.

Melissa experimented with this concept at her own wedding last summer and planned a wedding reception in Lawrenceville this “Marathon weekend” at the Teamsters’ building.

“Attendees will either think its amazing…or really weird but I think the runners will love it,” said Harmon.

Harmon thought of many of the things the standard Pinterest mom would’ve liked: bibs for invites, running shoes for bride and groom, pasta and pierogi dinner to “carb load” for Sunday’s race.  But there was more.

“Melissa really thought of everything. Every way that you could have worked running into the reception she made it happen…and it wasn’t obnoxious,” said Becky an IT Manager at PPG and maid-of-honor in the event Friday.

Instead of signing a guest book, attendees signed a quilt with a sharpie.  The quilt was made by Harmon and was comprised of race T-shirts that the bride and groom had acquired over the years.  The attendees often signed squares that were races they competed in as well.

The “flowers” for the races weren’t flowers at all.  They were Eat ‘N Park smiley cookies, which are often given at the end of local races to finishers and paper flowers made from old race bibs.   The “vases” they were in were Nalgene water bottles.  The favors were bags and race T-shirts.

With downtown Pittsburgh being one of the youngest cities in the country and the millennial population rising quirky ideas like this might not be too crazy. Young people love different….and cheap.

“I GUARANTEE this is one of the cheaper themes you’ll find for a wedding,” stated one of the guests who also belongs to the Pittsburgh chapter of the Green Building Association.  “It’s also very green.  The bride and groom could have easily thrown all this stuff away, instead it’s being used as decorations.”  Maybe this is something the Green Building Association would like being involved in.

Harmon, who teaches at the Community Day School in Oakland says that she’d be able to plan 5-10 of these a year, with the weekends of The Great Race and the Marathon making the most sense, but acknowledges the other great races in Pittsburgh (with a lower ‘g’).  The Pirates and Penguins races, the Run Around the Square, the Race for the Cure as well as the non traditional Color Me Rad and the Mud on the Mountain are all races worthy of pairing with states Harmon.

Harmon’s PR’dinLove is another new Pittsburgh business taking its innovation and energy in all sorts of directions and we locals are the beneficiaries.