It appears the Chilmark Road Race will continue as usual Saturday. No big changes. “Hopefully it’s going to be exactly like it’s been the last 31 years,” said James Goodenough Heuser, the director of the Chilmark Community Center.

As usual, registration for the event filled up quickly; the 1,500-person limit has been reached. “People come up every moment trying to get in,” Mr. Heuser said Thursday. “We’re already turning people away.”

The course is still 3.1 miles. The event still gives out the coveted Chilmark Road Race shirts. The winning prize is a two-and-a-half-pound live lobster. The money raised still goes to the Chilmark Community Center.

But there will be a new sight on the course this year: red bandanas.

A small group calling themselves the Chilmark Red Bandana Runners will partake in the race with red bandanas on their shirts in honor of a Sept. 11, 2001 hero whose parents owned a home in Chilmark for years.

Welles Crowther, 24, worked in the South Tower of the World Trade Center and was there on Sept. 11.

He always wore a red bandana and had one protecting his face as he helped people in the tower to safety on that day.

“Welles began to carry a red bandana from the age of 7 or 8,” his mother Alison Crowther wrote in an e-mail last week. His father gave him his first one, telling him, “the white handkerchief in the pocket is for ‘show,’ the bandana is for ‘blow’ (to blow your nose, etc),” Ms. Crowther wrote. Welles had red and his father had blue, so they could tell them apart in the laundry. Since then, he wore his bandana everywhere in his pocket or underneath his helmet when he was playing sports.

In 2002, when Welles’ body was recovered in the wreckage of the collapsed towers, news outlets from CNN to Fox News ran stories of “The Man in the Red Bandana.” The cloth covering his mouth served as a way for survivors to identify him as their saving hero.

“He’s definitely my guardian angel — no ifs, ands or buts — because without him, we would be sitting there, waiting [until] the building came down,” 9/11 survivor Ling Young told CNN in 2002.

Similar stories were circulating around Ground Zero only days after 9/11, Ms. Crowther wrote: “People were not sure if it was just an urban legend, but clearly it was not, and we were so blessed to be able to finally learn so many details about what happened to Welles.”

In December 2006, Welles was posthumously made an honorary member of the FDNY.

There have been Red Bandana Runners in the New York Marathon and there is a Welles Remy Crowther Red Bandana Run at Boston College. Now the symbol honoring the civilian hero comes to one of the Vineyard’s long-standing traditions, with dashes of red to appear along the race’s Middle Road course.

Brian and Toni Curry, summer residents of Chilmark along with their son Timothy, who was Welles’ classmate and lacrosse teammate at Boston College, have organized the group. They will be joined by friends and classmates of Welles.

“So when you see someone with a red bandana on their T-shirt, take a moment to say a private thank you to all who sacrificed on 9/11,” Ms. Curry wrote in an e-mail last week. “Thank you, Welles!”

The race starts at 10:30 a.m. Saturday morning, 3.1 miles east of Chilmark Town Hall on Middle Road. Registration is tonight from 5 to 7 p.m. or Saturday morning from 8 to 9:30 a.m. at the Chilmark Community Center.

A flyer for the event warns, “If you check in late, you may miss the race as we must bus you to the Start!”

Double strollers, skates, dogs, scooters and skateboards are prohibited.

For the third year, LIV Organic, an organic sports drink, will be the event’s only sponsor. The drink will be distributed at the finish line.

Hugh Weisman created the race in 1978. In its first year, it had about 250 participants.

“Hey, it’s a crazy idea, everyone told him it wouldn’t work,” said Mr. Heuser. “And 31 years later here we are, still doing it.”