Our third week of the FLRC Challenge is almost in the books! We’re up to 104 participants, and we set a new high-water mark for weekly mileage this year with 683 so far (the first two weeks were 565 and 532).
Beebe Lake remains the most popular of the Classic Challenge courses, and of the Personal Challenge-only courses, Cornell Botanic Gardens is at the top—lots of interest in the relatively short Cornell-adjacent courses.
A few other course notes:
- Duck Trails has some of the trail blocked off at the moment, but @melissawallace suggests that the trail nearer the pond works as well.
- Waterfront Trail still has some paving going on, but @Marie_Donnelly posted a picture showing that it’s easy to route around this time,
- Beebe Lake has geese families on it, as @Caitlin_Loehr noted. Give them a wide berth—they will go after you if they think you’re threatening their goslings.
- I’m contemplating a suggestion from @Petorius to move the start/finish of Tortoise & Hare from the bridge to where the road starts up the hill, so runners don’t have to run through the parking lot twice. Opinions?
In the individual competitions, a few names are starting to stand out thanks to their mileage. Pete Kresock has finished all the Classic Challenge courses and is over half done with his Personal Challenge of all 44 courses, giving him top spots in Most Points for men, Most Miles, and Most Courses, while Caitlin Loehr and Harshil Shah occupy the other spots.
Another notable is John Hummel in second place in Most Points and third for Age Grade (which sorts first by the number of Classic Challenge courses run). Then there’s the married couple of the Alexes: Alex Morgan and Alex Guyon (who also share a birthday, but at least they didn’t select an identical hyphenated surname) in their first Challenge after moving to Ithaca last year. And Molly Doruska, who has been a high-ranking finisher in past years, is cruising to finish her Challenge before heading off for a job at Clarkson in a few months.
Two photos this week from races outside Ithaca:
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Patrick Milano won the Corn Ducky 5K in Cortland (and submitted it to Lakefront Loops. And that was despite pushing Theo in the stroller, stopping to check the course map, and picking up a hat he dropped!
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Tonya Engst ran the Toronto Half Marathon (good for a Freeville Fly-In effort) and took this photo of Tristan Lambert, Rebecca Lambert, and Peter Frazier after the race. We’ll see what they can do in the Challenge once they recover from their Toronto races.
There’s no group run this weekend because we have the Women’s Distance Festival 5K on Sunday morning. Those who aren’t women could instead run the Belle Sherman 5K on Saturday—a finish in either can be submitted to the Lakefront Loops course with a race report.
Until next week, keep covering the ground!