PHILADELPHIA — The brides wore running gear — sneakers, comfy shirts, and, for one of them, a black ball cap that said “I Do.”

Kara McElvaine and Shelbie Turner got married Saturday while running the Philadelphia Half Marathon, exchanging vows every mile, smiling through the finish line.

“We decided to celebrate being each other’s other half by running a half-marathon,” Turner said.

It was an unconventional wedding, but an over-the-top joyous one, their family waving signs that said “Here Come The Brides” and “Love Wins” and 15,000 people running 13.1 miles alongside them in the November chill.

“This,” Ranae McElvaine, Kara’s mom, said, “is so them.”

A meet-awkward led to more

McElvaine and Turner had more of a meet-awkward than a meet-cute.

They were both visiting Oregon State University, where they were on recruiting visits for a graduate program in human development and family sciences, in 2017. They were assigned to be roommates.

“I entered the hotel room in the middle of the night to this stranger who was asleep, and she popped up and immediately she said, ‘Is it Kare-a or Kar-a?,’” McElvaine said. (It’s Kare-a.)

“It was a super awkward meeting,” said Turner, 31. But the two smoothed it over, both choosing to pursue Ph.D.s at Oregon State, becoming colleagues and classmates, friends and, eventually, more.

During the pandemic, McElvaine, who’s 32 and originally from South Jersey, and Turner, who hails from Virginia, became a couple. They merged their lives and continued along their Ph.D. paths — Turner studies gerontology and McElvaine the experience of children and teens in the education sector.

After Turner earned her Ph.D. and got a postdoctoral fellowship at Cornell University’s Medical College, they relocated to the East Coast, moving to Pitman, near McElvaine’s family. (McElvaine anticipates completing her doctorate next year, and works as a project manager for Facing History and Ourselves, an education nonprofit.)

Choosing to make their relationship permanent was an easy decision. But they were stumped on the how.

“We ran the full gamut from ‘We should just elope’ to ‘If we’re going to have a wedding, we should have a giant party,’” said McElvaine.

“Nothing quite fit,” said Turner.

Eventually, Turner had an idea. They were training for the Philadelphia Half Marathon together.

“I said, ‘What if we just treat the half as our wedding?’ Kara twisted her head and said, ‘That could work. This probably would be exactly what would work for us.’”

That is: the couple are “annoyingly goal-oriented,” Turner said. Traditional weddings felt materialistic in a way they were not particularly into. They liked the idea of doing something good for their health, and training runs felt like premarital counseling, they said.

“I quickly realized that training for a half-marathon would be less painful for me than preparing for a big wedding,” Turner said.

And, McElvaine said, as members of the LGBTQ community, they felt there were fewer expectations around their ceremony. They were a little freer to “blow it all out of the water” and do what felt right to them, even if meant no fancy clothes, repeatedly telling people that, yes, they were going straight to sign their marriage license and celebrate, sweaty and tired, right after crossing the finish line.

‘Pace yourself’

McElvaine and Turner’s wedding day dawned cold but clear, a relief after Friday’s rain. Turner had run half-marathons before, but Saturday was McElvaine’s first.

The two were glad that Friday’s rain had ended, but the wind was biting in stretches, and they both felt it.

Their vows — written on paper, stuffed in the pockets of Turner’s shorts and McElvaine’s leggings — acknowledged the similarities between marriage and a half-marathon.

“I promised that I would always help her over the finish line,” Turner said, laughing. “I promised that I wouldn’t make her do this again.”

At a stop for photos and to hug their family at Rittenhouse Square, the couple’s niece showered them with birdseed.

And three hours, six minutes after they began the half-marathon, Turner and McElvaine finished it. They kissed; they got finisher medals draped around their necks, matching wedding jewelry.

“Relationally, I feel like it was so great to kick off our marriage by doing something really hard,” McElvaine said.

Their grandmothers signed their marriage license afterward, at a family brunch at the Barnes Foundation. Though it was a small celebration, immediate family only, they felt as if they had a much larger group with them: The couple encouraged their friends and other family members to contribute songs to a wedding playlist that McElvaine and Turner played when they ran.

Friends shared advice, too: “Pace yourself, push through the hard stretches (they will come), enjoy the moment — running advice or marriage advice — you decide!” and “Keep your goal in mind. Never, ever give up. When it gets hard, hold hands. Lean on each other.”

A theme wedding

McElvaine said her legs felt heavy as the pair made their way from the finish line, near the Philadelphia Museum of Art, to the Barnes; the two had trained for 10 miles, not 13, and “those last three miles were a doozy.” But both she and Turner kept smiling.

Turner’s Nana, Peggy Cutchin, kissed her granddaughter and her new bride.

“We’re just so happy for the both of them,” said Cutchin, who traveled from Virginia for the momentous run.

Dixie and David Scurlock, McElvaine’s grandparents, said they were a bit surprised by their granddaughter’s announcement of her unconventional wedding, but excited.

“It’s very different,” said David Scurlock, who lives in Newtown.

“Another theme wedding,” Dixie Scurlock said. (And, no, the guests did not have to run to attend the wedding, as some incredulous friends wondered.)

The newly married couple aren’t planning an immediate honeymoon; they’d like to plan one for next summer, to Ireland. But they did have one post-run/wedding order of business to ease their tired muscles: massages planned for Sunday.

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