Approximately 31 years after finishing up my cross country career with Coach Truce, I ran in a comparable cross country race to our school days. The 8K championship race of a 5-race upstate ny series, hosted by the Genesee Valley Harriers, reminded me very much of a typical large invititational in the Truce days, even about the same 5- mile race distance. This race had over 160 runners, many of them fairly high caliber
post-collegiate age athletes, plus many enthusiastic "age group" (i.e., codger) runners such as myself. In short, with a time of 32:28 (about 6:32/mile), I finished in 73rd out of 161, and only 11th out of 50 in the 50 to 59 year age group (sadly, called the "veterans" age group - doggonit, I'm old).
I even had to dig deep for an allout sprint down the final straight as a fellow 50 to 59er tried to come back and catch me, after I put on a good half-mile surge, with a faster surge during the last 300 meters to pass him. Embarassingly, I even leaned at the tape to get that 73rd place and coveted 11th place age gr
oup finish!Another highlight of the race was bumping into Jim Miner afterwards. Jim, now in the supervets over 60 age group, is still running and doing crazy stunts like back to back marathons on consecutive days (some might remember his famous double Sub-3 hour marathon stunt, running sub-3 in both the Buffalo marathon, driving all night to NYC, and running sub-3 in NYC the next day). He outdid himself recently by running two marathons in ONE day, with a 6-hour drive in between events. By the way, did anyone ever figure out why Jim used to run with us, when he wasn't really in school at Binghamton? In fact, did he ever go to school there?
Results are at the link below (or click on the title), and I'll modify this post with some good race photos later, so stay tuned!
Mark
http://www.yentiming.com/results/2010/upstate/Meet5/Men/upstate_overall.html
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