Nice weather tends to bring out huge crowds to Boston Common. But on June 2, the mob was rather more organized than usual.

About 12,000 runners from companies around New England assembled for the JP Morgan Chase Corporate Challenge, the second-largest race in the city – after the Boston Marathon, of course – to dash a quick 3.5 miles through town. George Nicholson, Boston-based senior vice president at JP Morgan, gave up running in the challenge in order to be a chief organizer and officiator. Companies of all sorts, including many local big-name financial firms like Wellington Management and SunLife Financial, regularly join the race in droves, some of them making a strong showing – this year’s top men’s team was from Fidelity Investments.

And Boston isn’t JP Morgan’s only race site. The international banking firm has 13 such races around the world, in places as close as Buffalo, N.Y., and as far-flung as Singapore.

George Nicholson

Title: Senior vice president, JP Morgan Chase; Boston

Age: 47

Experience: 15 years

So for a corporation-specific run like this, who participates? Do you seek out any particular business partners to take part?

About 700 companies or so were represented – big teams, small teams. You have Fidelity, I think was the largest, they just beat us out [with] over 200 participants. You get the big organizations, and you get the smaller organizations too, so it’s really the gamut. I think we certainly try to identify and work with those institutions that are clients of ours and friends of ours, but it’s almost company-agnostic. We recognize it as just a great team-building, camaraderie-building event that has really kind of taken on a life of its own in the last 28 years. We do reach out – we highlight various companies on the website, we have dialogue with company team captains, but for the most part it’s just such a huge universe of companies that show up and participates in this thing.

Various road races have become so popular, almost trendy – do other companies do anything like this?

I think this is the second-biggest race in Boston, behind the actual marathon. We’re really only limited to 12,000 [participants] by the city and the infrastructure. We could certainly do as we did in New York and split it up into two days, we’d probably double [the crowd]. It’s immensely popular. I remember moving to Boston 24 years ago, and I think one of the first things I did here was to run in the corporate challenge.

Boston is such a run-happy city – is this one of the bigger events in the global corporate race?

It’s not tiny. So I would say on average, Chicago is probably bigger – Syracuse, Rochester, you’re probably talking 12,000, 13,000, or 15,000 probably. I’m not exactly certain, but you take Frankfurt, that’s 70,000. So in that sense, it’s one of the smaller ones. It’s kind of average for the U.S. … but it’s a big event, no question about it.

Has the race changed much after almost 30 years?

Again, I remember participating in the Corporate Cup Challenge, and it must have been the fourth or fifth year that it was in Boston. I remember it being hugely popular – it seemed as though the crowd was just as big. Obviously that’s not necessarily the case because we’ve only sold out for 17 years, but I think it was more of a team-building exercise. It wasn’t certainly the speed with which they’re running today. It does seem there’s more of a health focus today than, “let’s get together with a bunch of coworkers and have a great night.” We had a colleague up here from New York, and he ran in the race. And his comment was “I’ve never seen so many healthy people in one city, in one place, in one time.”

Any highlights from this year’s race?

It was great – we missed the real foul weather by one day. And even building up to the race, it was windy, it was cloudy and then amazingly, at 7 o’clock, there was nothing but sunshine … Some years, you get challenges – the weather’s too hot or there’s road construction – but this was a wonderful evening. The most powerful thing – I was standing on stage and the crowd started signing the Star-Spangled Banner, without the music. They were waiting for the music [to start], I’m not sure what happened, but all of a sudden the crowd started signing. It was immensely powerful. I looked down the road, and you’ve got 12,000 people signing the Star-Spangled Banner.

Top Five Facts JP Morgan’s 2011 Corporate Challenge Race:

• Unsurprisingly, teams from retail athletic companies do well: Puma North America took the top time among female teams, and Marathon Sports won for mixed-gender teams.
• The top individual men’s time was 16:48 for the 3.5 mile race, and the top women’s time was 19:17.
• This year’s top men and women soundly beat out the winning times for 2010’s race, which were 17:35 and 20:00, respectively.
• 2011’s Boston race was the 17th-straight year the event was at full capacity for race participants.
• Philanthropies benefiting from the event this year were the Emerald Necklace Conservancy and Horizons for Homeless Children.