Maybe you win a lot. Or maybe you just run a lot of races that give finisher’s medals—marathons, half marathons, novelty 5Ks. Either way, that first treasured medal eventually blooms into a few pounds of hardware weighing down your doorknob or filling up your dresser drawer. Here are some more fun ways to appreciate—or dispose of — those medals.
Give Them Away
Medals 4 Mettle takes donations of marathon, half-marathon, and triathlon medals. They replace the ribbon with their own, and give them to people, mostly children, who are enduring their own challenges with cancer, chronic illness, trauma, or other life challenges. “These medals are awarded to pay-it-forward to those who must run a much more difficult race than the medal donors’ races; a race they did not choose to run: a race where the finish line might not be known.”
Get (or Make) a Proper Hanging Rack
If you still want to see all those medals hanging up next to each other, try one of the display racks that has hooks for medals underneath a cheesy saying like “born to run.” Some also have a place to hang race bibs, if you like to save the numbers you wore during the race.
This is a clever combination: hooks underneath a chalkboard. You can clip bibs to the chalkboard, and also write the times of your personal records.
It’s not hard to make a rack, either. You can repurpose a rack meant for coats or keys, or a rod meant for holding hand towels. (Just loop the medals’ ribbons around the rod.) If you’re handy, attach some hooks or nails to a board and make it as fancy as you like.
If there’s a particular race you want to memorialise — your first marathon, perhaps—you can put the bib, medal, and any mementos you like (map of the race course?) in a shadow box, which is basically a three-dimensional picture frame.
If you have a home gym, that’s the perfect place to hang your display. Use it to motivate yourself to bust those PRs.
Turn Them Into Something
Glue magnets to the back of your medals, and they become fridge magnets: always on display, but still useful. (You’ll have to remove the ribbon, of course.) Redditor ChefAaronFitz writes that it works to use neodymium magnets and Gorilla glue. Here’s the finished result.
Or buy a coaster kit, and insert the medal inside of it. This works even for irregularly shaped medals, as long as they fit inside the coaster, and once again your medal is on display without taking up any wall space.
If you have a Christmas tree, and if your medals aren’t obnoxiously large, swap the ribbon for a hook, and you have yourself a set of tree ornaments.
Comments