THE EXTRA MILE: Cindy Cobb's quilt is a montage of Jubilee Run memories

It took her 25 races, but Cindy Cobb got the quilt done. Twenty five years of Jubilee races -- from when they started as 10K runs, later switching to 8Ks -- Cindy, 52, had a collection of not only awards, but lots and lots of T-shirts.

And as it happens with runners, those T-shirts started piling up.

And now, all those races -- all those miles, all that dedication -- comfort her in a full-sized quilt. Along with the 25 T-shirts that make up the quilt, five additional squares on the quilt have pictures of Cindy on them.

It took a couple of months to make -- she machine-sewed together the 30 squares, and hand-quilted the front and back of the quilt together -- and for the most part it sits stored in a closet. It gets pulled out on colder nights in her Prattville home.

Cindy decided to sew together the shirts because the Jubilee Run "was such a special race for me ... because it was the first 10K race I ran (in 1978) when I started running."

She has missed only one race since -- in 1986 -- when she was too far along in a pregnancy to participate. Her second child was early enough in the womb to tag along with mom.

If you're anything like my running friends, you have a dozen or more shirts collected from races from April to today. I don't know what they do with theirs, but I'm going to keep mine around for a while.

Unlike Cindy's shirts, mine bear no real significance to me at the moment. Maybe after I've been running again for 10 years, I'll start thinking along Cindy's lines. Maybe, in six years, I'll put my own quilt together -- shirts from road races, or maybe triathlons. Maybe my significance will just be the fact I'm out doing good for myself. Or, that I'm setting a good example for my daughter. Maybe one day I'll be putting hers together.

Cindy has given away her fair share of race shirts -- to friends at work, her husband. It frees up a lot of space in her house. Today, she has 10 more Jubilee shirts and figures she needs to run 15 more races to complete another quilt. That's 15 more years of racing ... Jubilee needs to stick around as well.

Cindy will be ready to make it. Quilting is a regular hobby of hers. She made the Jubilee quilt, she said, after the quilting bug first bit. This is the only T-shirt quilt she has made. And while the reaction to it from friends is positive, they often want to know if she'll make them one.

The answer is no, Cindy says with a laugh.

Web sites for running shirts:

?  This site -- http://www.runtheplanet.com/community/humor/t-shirts.asp. -- talks about saving PR shirts, status shirts, pretty shirts, unusual events shirts, long-sleeved shirts.

?  This blog -- http://runtrails.blogspot.com/2007/01/too-many-t-shirts-ke-ilt.html -- shows how one runner enlisted the services of campusquilt.com a couple of years ago.

A simple Google search found these sites:

?  http://www.elegacyquilts.com/tshirt_quilts.htm

?  http://www.tshirtquilt.com/t-shirt-quilt.htm

?  http://www.ontherunevents.com/memoryquilts

Next week, a report from the Callaway Gardens Sprint Triathlon -- my first triathlon.

Kym Klass is an R³ member, avid runner, and Metro reporter for the Montgomery Advertiser.