Allow me to interrupt your regular Wednesday programming for an important message—the FLRC Challenge has seen its first completion of all 10 courses! Drumroll, please…
In keeping with the way the Challenge lets everyone complete, regardless of age or speed, the person first across the finish line was 58-year-old Jamie Loehr, with a 46.05% age grading. Congratulations to Jamie! (Who, I’ll note, is also a busy doctor, which makes his achievement all the more impressive.)
We have a tight race for second place, with three contenders currently having nine courses under their belts: Caitlin Loehr, Gabrielle Woo, and Bob Walters. Watch this space to see who qualifies for their FLRC Challenge medal next.
And if, like me, you’ve done only a few of the courses, never fear, since you have the rest of the year to check them off your Challenge list.
Our second Challenge completion goes to Caitlin Loehr! Although Caitlin and Jamie don’t necessarily run together, it’s great to see a husband-and-wife team as our first two people to finish all 10 courses. (And they’re doing great things for the @Fabulous-50s team points!)
Kudos to Gabrielle Woo for braving the cold rain today for our third completion of the FLRC Challenge! She did it in style, too, with a double effort that combined Forest Frolic and the South Hill Rec Way.
Bob Walters is our remaining runner with nine efforts—I’m betting he ends up out in Virgil this weekend. Liz Hartman, Pete Kresock, and Karen Ingall could also complete their medal requirements with a pair of runs over the weekend.
And no sooner do I post when I see that Pete Kresock, race director of the Danby Down & Dirty race, ran his own course to complete the FLRC Challenge. Congrats, Pete, on being our fifth finisher!
And then there were eight. Congrats to Matthew Clark (@mclark) for completing the FLRC Challenge on today’s group run of the Danby Down & Dirty course!
Will Jesse Koenecke (@JesseKoennecke) head out to Virgil to run his final Forest Frolic course this weekend? Or will one of the seven people who have eight courses under their belts run some extra miles to sneak in ahead?
I won’t post the screenshot of all the finishers anymore since it’s getting big, but I’ll try to keep giving shout-outs to everyone who completes all ten courses since it’s a real achievement.
Three people completed the FLRC Challenge this weekend: Mickie Sanders-Jauquet (@mickiejauquet, FLRC board member and VP of Roads), Melissa Wallace (@melissawallace, member of the FLRC Timing Team), and Jilene Demont.
Klaas Van Wijk (@klaas) has now completed the FLRC Challenge—way to go, Klaas!
He’s also now in second place in the age-graded competition behind @caitlin-loehr, although @jeanluc has just one more course to go and could supplant Klaas in second with a fast time.
For the age-graded competition, it could start to get interesting as people see which courses they can concentrate on to improve their age-grading. The trick for figuring this out is to load the Fastest page for a course, and then to click the Age Grade column to sort by that. So for Thom B, for instance, you can see that Caitlin has the best age-grade by a lot, with Klaas in second, whereas Jean-Luc, by virtue of running it easy with me on Saturday, has plenty of room to improve.
We have two more completions of the FLRC Challenge today. Most impressively, Jesse Canfield (@Jesse_Canfield) finished his 10 courses as part of the FLRC 100K Ultra Challenge! That merits its own thread (and be sure to read his report!).
And second, accompanying Jesse for part of his Danby Down & Dirty run, was FLRC Challenge stalwart Heather Cobb (@heathercobb3)! She’s done so much already, with a pair of quad-course efforts and a regular top-three ranking in the Most Miles competition, that it’s almost hard to believe she hadn’t run her 10th course until now.
Called it — congrats to Jean-Luc Jannink (@jeanluc) on completing his FLRC Challenge courses and leapfrogging into second place in the Age Grade competition! Helping Jean-Luc’s ascent up the age-graded charts was a great 1:06:01 effort at the in-person Thom B. race yesterday, nearly 14 minutes faster than his first easy run there. If he puts in a faster time on Danby Down & Dirty now that he knows the course, he could take over first place in the Age Grade competition, though I think @caitlin-loehr could come back with some faster trail times as well.
Judging from the timestamp in the Activity Log for this morning, Jullien Flynn may have had a wet time on the Danby Down & Dirty course, but it was what she needed to complete her FLRC Challenge! Congrats, Jullien—great to see you finish this off before graduating in the summer. 18 people have now completed the Challenge.
From the identical times posted, I hope Jullien and Liz Hartman and Jilene Demont and Gabrielle Woo had a nice run together. It’s so heartening to see people using the Challenge as an excuse to get to know one another better.
It was just a drizzle this morning, and the trail was in perfect conditions with no mud but softer than Thom B last week. I definitely owe it to the challenge for meeting Liz, Jilene, and Gabby!
We’ve had a lull in FLRC Challenge completions but it turns out that I missed one due to a technical issue. Congrats to Bob Talda (@bobtalda) for finishing his 10 courses a while back!
Bob had scanned the QR code on the Thom B. sign when he finished that course but due to a lack of connectivity, it failed to upload. Two takeaways:
Be sure to check the leaderboard after your runs to make sure the upload worked. This is most likely with Thom B, Forest Frolic, and Danby Down & Dirty, where the cell service is weak.
If that happens, you can just repost the saved result. From the main screen in the Webscorer app, go to Race Archive > My Results > ResultName > Post My Results.
We’ve had two new FLRC Challenge completions in the last few days. Congratulations to Molly Doruska (@mdoruska3) and Steve Ryan (@sryan004) for finishing off their 10 courses! I had the pleasure of accidentally meeting Steve while on my morning run and joining him for a few miles of his successful Pseudo Skunk Cabbage effort yesterday.
They’re also notable by being the youngest (Molly is 23) and oldest (Steve is 69) finishers of the Challenge so far. And interestingly, they don’t have a lot of competition. 15-year-old Crosby Woods (@crosby.woods) has run seven courses so far, but both Alex Drazic (@themandrazic) at 20 and Kyle Infantino at 21 have only three each. And only David Rossiter (@D_G_Rossiter) at 71 and Deb Bliss (@debbliss) at 73 are older than Steve, and they have three and four courses each.
Congrats to Crosby Woods (@crosby.woods) for completing his tenth course and the FLRC Challenge! He and Michelle Woods (@MWoods) took advantage of the cool weather this morning to run Pseudo Skunk Cabbage, and now she’s only missing Danby Down & Dirty for her tenth course. I love seeing a mother-son running team.
Crosby has now taken over both the title of youngest FLRC Challenge finisher, at age 15, and he has moved into second place for Most Points behind Adam Pacheck.
