@Challengers Yesterday brought our first Tough Tarmac Challenge completion of the year, and it’s no surprise that it was Gill Haines-Sharp with companionship from Dior the dog on Triple Hump and a biking Ruth Sproul on Black Diamond Cass to Park. Congrats, Gill!
The weather was pretty good for such an effort, starting off with a cool, damp morning and some afternoon sun making for warmer temperatures. Fingers crossed that completing it during the AQI alert yesterday has no lingering effects.
@Challengers Congrats to Pete Kresock for notching our second Tough Tarmac Challenge completion of the year on Sunday! It was a great day for such a run.
@Challengers He’s back! Congrats to Dennis Stadelman, one of our mileage monsters, for his first FLRC Challenge runs since late April. Back then, he swung down from Syracuse to notch our first Tough Trail Challenge; on Monday, he added to his Ultra Challenge collection with a Tough Tarmac Challenge completion, illustrated with numerous posts.
@Challengers Kudos to two runners new to the Challenge, Evelyn Goldwasser and Daniela Graffeo, for jumping from four courses done to nine in one day by running the five road courses to complete the FLRC Tough Tarmac Challenge today!
They’ve run everything together this summer, and for the Tough Tarmac Challenge, they dispensed with Triple Hump early on and then moved on to Black Diamond Cass to Gorge. With the two longest courses done, they did Lakefront Loops 5K and then Town & Gown Up & Down before capping it all off with a Sweet 1600. Nice running, you two!
The weather turns cool and @Challengers come out of the woodwork… Congratulations to Pebblehead/Stonehead/Boulderhead leader Chris Petroff, who just signed up for the Challenge and immediately went out to complete the five road courses for the Tough Tarmac Challenge.
Even more impressive is that he biked between courses, adding at least 7.7 miles of biking to the 27.4 miles of running.
This may also be the first time anyone has split a Challenge to go home and sleep during the middle. You have 12 hours to complete the 5 courses, so Chris led off with the Black Diamond Cass to Gorge, Lakefront Loops, and Town & Gown Up & Down courses that are all quite close last night, and then finished up with a Sweet 1600 and Triple Hump this morning. As a result, he ended up with by far the fastest running time (3:02:13) but the longest total time (11:41:38), finishing with only 19 minutes to spare.
The question is if Chris will aim to complete the remaining five courses with a Tough Trail Challenge, which would require a lot more biking.
@Challengers With just seven days left in the Challenge, we have our seventh Tough Tarmac Challenge completion of the year. Congrats to Amalia Skilton for completing all five road courses yesterday, first getting Triple Hump out of the way, then coming into Ithaca for Town & Gown Up & Down, Black Diamond Cass to Gorge, a Sweet 1600 on the Cornell track, and a final Lakefront Loops 5K.
She finished in 6:04:24 of running time, with 8:42:27 of elapsed time.
I was curious how the amount of downtime varied between efforts, and ChatGPT was happy to evaluate the screenshot and produce this chart. (I did only sanity checks on the math, so I hope it got it right.) It’s amusing that our two fastest finishers, Chris Petroff and Pete Kresock, are on opposite ends of the chart, but that’s because Chris used some of his downtime to sleep and biked between the courses, whereas Pete did them as quickly as possible.
