 The COVID-19 vaccine and flu vaccine are different, and it's safe to get both vaccines at the same time. So don't hesitate. Vaccinate. The Pike County Health Department reminds you that the strongest defense is vaccination against flu and COVID. The Union Half Marathon and Relay will be held this Saturday, April 2nd, to support the Union High School cross-country team. A portion of the proceeds from the race will be going to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Yeah, this is the fifth year of us running this race. So we started this up five years ago. It's kind of been really neat because it's emerging of a half marathon between two different towns. So you start in the town of Big Stone Gap and eventually you'll go through a town of Appalachian and back in Big Stone. You can run it as a full half marathon at 13.1 or you can get up to a team of four and run it as a relay. So that way, basically, you're running a 5K. If you have a team of four, you're just running a 5K as part of the half marathon. The race began after Appalachia, Virginia converted an old railroad track into the Powell River Trail. Yeah, basically what had happened is the green bell, which it kind of circles around the town of Big Stone Gap, Virginia, it had existed for years. But then the town of Appalachia actually converted an old railroad track into a into a trail as well called the Powell River Trail. And on that, there actually you go through two different old train tunnels like one of them is the B Rock Tunnel, which at one point used to be in the world's Guinness Book of World Records for the shortest train tunnel. And then the Callahan Tunnel is actually a really long, darker kind of tunnel. So you run through both of those. So was running one day and kind of made up the course just to kind of get some distance. And from that we created the Union Half Marathon. The Half Marathon can be run as an individual or as a relay on a team of two to four people, you know, training for half marathon requires a lot of training. And some people just don't want to do a half marathon and have no desire to. So we have a lot of people over the past, you know, four years and then even into this year that has signed up for the relay part of it. Because they want to be a part of the course and they're typically really neat. We do some pretty cool medals that are indicative of this area. So they what our medal is, it's always some type of aspect of big stone or Appalachia. So they're kind of unique to that. So we have a lot of people that can't do a half marathon, but they can do a 5k. So if I could get three friends to sign up with me, we're basically each running a 5k and and we've we've got the the half marathon course ran. Registration is $50 for the half marathon and $30 per relay runner. For more information and to register, go to Union Half Marathon and Relay on Facebook. For Mountain Top News, I'm Brianna Robinson.