Run to Win

The USATF Club Cross Country Championships were this morning. Peter Magill of team Fluffy Bunny won the masters’ 10k in 34:20.2, leading his team to first place with 59 points and a total time of 2:58:04.7.

Dirigo had a strong showing to improve 3 places and capture 2^nd place this year, trailing by 12 points with a 1 minute and 27.7 second deficit. Michael Payson led the way, finishing 7^th in 35:17.2.

GCS Triad (Formerly Gate City Striders, PR Racing and Moose Milers), a Maine/New Hampshire team, finished in 13^th place with 357 points in the masters 10k. They finished in 36^th place with 1088 points in the open 10k.

Christine Reaser was the lone female Dirigo competitor, and had a strong showing in the masters 6k race despite falling on a hay bale. She ran 23:15 and trailed winner Joan Nesbit Mabe by less than half of a minute.

(Results: Masters 6k – Masters 10k – Open 6k – Open 10k – Press Release)

Last weekend, Ryan Shay died during the men’s Olympic Marathon Trials in New York City. He was a hard working young man that everybody liked. He came from a close knit community that has been trying to figure out how they are going to deal with his passing.

Over the past few days, there have been memorial track runs at his old high school as the town tries to cope with his loss. All across the country, runners are participating in their own 5.5 mile memorial run for him.

And why did he have to die? Joan Nesbit Mabe things that drugs killed Ryan Shay. (Click here to continue reading…)

Joan Nesbit Mabe has agreed to coach a group of elite (or elite-hopeful) runners in Carrboro, North Carolina.

Fleet Feet Carrboro has partnered with my lifelong sponsor, New Balance Athletic Shoes, Inc., to help support a distance running team of 7 women and 7 men (with USATF Elite club) in Carrboro, NC. We will be called The Carrboro Athletics Club, the CAC. Soon, we will have a team blog with weekly posts from our athletes so friends, famlies, and fans can chart their progress from now until the 2008 Olympic Trials.

I look forward to reading about their training and racing results, both to see how they manage to break into the professional community as well as to compare my own times and performances.

(Source: Joan Nesbit Mabe)

Joan Nesbit Mabe asked an elite athlete who wants her to coach him to write an essay on why he runs. Jason Jabaut spent a few weeks thinking about that, and after countless drafts wrote a bit over 400 words trying to explain it. In his essay (which you can read in full over at Songs of experience), he writes:

Thinking about why I run has directed me to realize many reasons why I do NOT run. I do not run for fun. I don’t run for fame. I’m definitely not doing it for fortune. There is a primal necessity that competing in this sport has wrought in me. I need to be satisfied. I haven’t felt it yet. I need to compete until I feel that satisfaction. I know it’s out there. It might not come after the perfect race, but it come after a race that I’ve spent thousands of hours preparing for and feel contentment directly upon crossing the finish line. I need to work harder than everyone else out there in order to achieve this. I need to work harder than everyone else simply in order to sleep at night.

(Click here to continue reading…)

I was reading over on Joan Nesbit Mabe’s site and saw that she was supporting a new organization called “Athletes Against Doping“. Their message is fairly simple and straight forward:

Today it isn’t good enough to be just a good athlete by running fast, jumping higher, etc. An athlete has to be a good student of the game. And that means, knowing what one is ingesting. The athlete is responsible. Ignorance is no excuse for the law, but it is constantly used as an excuse for athletes. And the public buys into this or accepts it. It’s equally sad that some athletes actually seem to use the “dumb jock” image to their advantage. [...] Compete Clean�or don’t compete.

They have a lot of good links to sites that describe rules for different sports, governing bodies, what drugs are banned and the like. They also have a small store where you can show your support for them. I have not bought anything, and do not intend to buy anything from them right away. The site did seem interesting to me, however, so I thought that I would share the find.