Elam Riehl knows the ins and outs of the Red Rose Run. The jostling for position and the thrumming of sneakers as thousands take off from Lancaster Square. The stretch through county park. The pain of Duke Street. The flash to the end.

The bearded 48-year-old truck driver was there this morning, after lacing up his Nikes and likely undergoing his usual pre-race ritual of drinking a cup of coffee and saying a small prayer.

It’s a routine that Riehl has practiced dozens, no, hundreds of times, before other races he’s run in more than 20 years.

Riehl is a runner’s runner, one of the dependables at the county’s Red Rose Run, Race Against Racism, Ephrata Firecracker and Lititz Pretzel Twist, as well as many other races outside the county.

The East Lampeter Township resident has pumped his legs over the Manheim Mile and up the Boston Marathon’s Heartbreak Hill (five times).

The Red Rose Run is his favorite local race, he says.

“I like the camaraderie,” he says. “A lot of people, it’s the only race they run that year.”

Riehl’s personal record for the course is 29:58, and he generally is in the top 30 to 50 male finishers in the race. Last year, he ran on a corporate team that won the corporate division.

Today, his time was 31:58, and he was the 78th male to finish.

Riehl, and competitive runners like him, are good for the Red Rose Run, says Keith White, the director of the longtime Lancaster race.

“In most races nowadays, you want to keep the top 15 to 20 percent of the field competing, that they’re racing against the competitors around them or trying to beat their best time,” he says. “Guys like Elam are very important to this race. It increases the level of what other people are trying to do.”

Riehl didn’t start running until relatively late in life, at least by many runners’ standards. Raised in a conservative Mennonite home, he first remembers racing in a relay race in the eighth grade. His team won.

But after his time at Pequea Valley High School, he was too busy working to have much time for running.

He had his own catering truck by the time he was 18, and later became a truck driver.

When Riehl was about 25, he had a friend and neighbor whose cousin was an avid runner.

Riehl remembers saying to his neighbor, “You want to go jogging?”

“He said, ‘Yeah, that’d be OK.’ ”

The pair went out and jogged two miles, and Riehl was hooked.

“It just made me feel good,” he says. “I’m not sure why.”

His first road race was the Penny Saver five-mile run in New Holland. It wasn’t long before he began showing up at other races. He did his first marathon in Harrisburg in 1984, two years after he began running.

In the meantime, he married his wife, Danita, and landed his present job as a truck driver for Turkey Hill Dairy, delivering ice cream and iced tea and occasionally the gigantic Turkey Hill cow to their destinations.

Because he has odd hours, sometimes leaving Lancaster County in the middle of the night, Riehl says running is the ideal sport for him. He can fit it in whenever and wherever he likes, often taking his running gear with him and working in a run while his truck has downtime at its destination.

Riehl runs about 25 to 30 races a year (so many he’s never worn many of the T-shirts he’s accumulated), usually including one marathon. He has done Boston, Chicago, New York and Big Sur in California, racing along scenic Route 1 along the Pacific Ocean.

In one crazy day in 2002, he ran two races in one morning, doing the five-mile Lititz Pretzel Twist, then jumping into his pickup truck and arriving just two minutes before the East Petersburg 5K began.

On his 40th birthday in 1996, he ran 40 miles — 20 in the morning and 20 in the evening.

More than 23 years after he took his first jog, Riehl still trains twice a week with his original running buddy, Barry Dippner.

Most weeks, he runs four times, putting in a total of 25 to 40 miles. His wife also is a runner, who sometimes rides a bicycle alongside Riehl as he runs.

Mark Amway is a local runner who owns the Inside Track store, which fields its own running team. An All-American and Olympic Trials qualifier in the marathon, he’s won the Red Rose Run, Ephrata Firecracker run and other local races.

He says he’s always glad to see Riehl at a race.

“He’s one of the nice guys,” he says. “A lot of guys know who he is, and he is competitive.”

Riehl is not deeply philosophical about running, not prone to discussions about hitting the wall or to dissections of the best training methods.

“Driving a truck, I don’t get any exercise. Running keeps my weight down,” he says, shrugging and smiling.

As he runs, he often reminisces about things in his childhood, or mulls things over in his head.

“It just gives you time to think,” he says. “I don’t know what it is, really. It clears your head. It does relieve stress.

“It’s work at first, but the more you do it, the better you get at it,” he says.

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