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Some people who run through the "T" on game days at the University of Tennessee's Neyland Stadium in Knoxville come away with an interesting impression.
You'd think it's an all-out sprint, they say, but it's actually more of a jog.
Maybe it's the aerodynamic drag caused by the hairs standing up on the back of your neck that slows you down.
Last year, UT celebrated 50 years of its iconic pre-game tradition, which involves the football team and others running onto Shield-Watkins Field through a "T" formed by the 300-plus- member Pride of the Southland Band.
According to those in the know, the tradition began in 1965 under then-coach Doug Dickey, who was looking for a way to help his players thread through the visitors' sideline on their way onto the turf. (These days the players run from an end zone.)
Perhaps no Tennessee family can claim more expertise on "T"-running than Ashley Boles and her forebears. Boles, a 20-year-old kinesiology major at UT and a student trainer for the football team, represents the third generation in her family to run through (or help form) the T.
It might have been four. Her great-grandfather, Jim McKamey, was drum major for the Pride of the Southland Band in the early 1940s, pre-dating the T-running tradition.
"Growing up, we were always coming up here [to Knoxville] for football games," says Ashley, who was reared in Chattanooga. "I've always had a sense of [UT] being home, especially since my great-grandfather was part of the band."
She said her first T-running experience wasn't without incident.
"I ran into a cameraman," she said. "It was hilarious."
Ashley's father Jim Boles, 45, was a walk-on football player at UT in the early 1990s; her mother, Laurel Batson Boles, was a majorette in the 1990s, and her grandmother, Becky Nanny Brown, was a twirler in the late 1960s.
Jim Boles, who is principal of the upper school at Chattanooga School for the Arts and Sciences, explains that he was a long-snapper in the early 1990s. He got to experience dressing out and running through the T, although he never actually made it into a game.
"I remember high-fiving the drum major," he said. "I tried to soak it up. I remember looking around to find my friends in the stands."
Jim remembers his wife, Laurel, became a majorette her junior year at UT, following in the footsteps of her mother, Becky Nanny Brown, who had been a majorette in the early days of the running of the T.
But it was Jim's grandfather, the late Jim McKamey, who had the highest profile among family members at UT games, as a high-stepping, mace-tossing drum major during the World War II era.
"When I was little, I could never figure out why my grandfather had a sword in his office [in Knoxville]," Boles said.
He said his grandfather told a story about marching in a bowl game parade and making an errant toss with his regimental baton.
"The way he told it, the baton hit the ground, flipped up and landed right in his hand," Boles explains. "He said the crowd roared, thinking he had done it on purpose."
Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6645. Follow him on Twitter @TFPCOLUMNIST. Subscribe to his Facebook updates at www.facebook.com/mkennedycolumnist.