I’m particularly pleased to welcome our 158th and youngest participant in the FLRC Challenge, six-year-old Simon Woods. Now, you might be thinking, “Six is pretty young to be tackling the Lick Brook & Treman FLT half-marathon course,” and you’d be right. However, after discussions with his mother, Michelle Woods, Simon is taking advantage of our new-in-2022 option for an accommodation for those who cannot physically complete all ten courses. Simon’s official challenge is to complete the six shorter courses, one for each year he is old. He’ll probably be walking parts of some of them, but hey, it’s all about covering the ground. If he does that, he’ll qualify for the coveted FLRC Challenge medal. If you’ve avoided registering because it wouldn’t be possible for you to even walk 13 miles, get in touch and we can come up with a personalized challenge.
It was great fun to have so many @Challengers in the 1600m race at Tuesday’s track meet, which gave us two new Sweet 1600 course records, Adam Pacheck’s 4:34 and Margaret Frank’s 5:48 (which she still has to enter in Webscorer; leaving Liz Hartman’s 5:53 in the lead until then). Others taking advantage of the track meet to lay down some fast times included Dave Kania, Roger Moseley, Michelle Woods, Verity Platt, Benedetta Carnaghi, Katie Gannon, Holly Folsom, and Tonya Engst.
Verity Platt and Katie Gannon received some extra hoopla when they crossed the finish line, since it qualified them for their Challenge completion medals. Other people finishing their tenth course this week were Matt Clark, Ryan Vooris, Susan Nye-Bleiler, and Elizabeth Rechtin—congratulations to all!
There was only a little movement on the leaderboard this week, with Ruth Sproul taking over the lead in Community Stars from Caitlin Loehr. Ruth’s regular runs with Anne Shakespeare and subsequent posts are always a highlight of my day. Also worth noting is how the @Fabulous-50s are starting to close the gap on the @Fantastic-40s—last week’s 8-point spread is now down to 5 points. Time to start thinking tactics, @Fabulous-50s!
It was a big week for us in mileage, with nearly 860 miles logged so far. That puts the group over 8,000 miles total and provides our second 1000-mile course: Taughannock Rim & Falls.
If you want to kick off next week with some group run miles, come join me and others on the Long Loomis course on Sunday morning—details here. It’s a lovely trail and fun to explore with the group if you haven’t yet tackled it. We have more group runs planned for later in the month too, so keep an eye on the forum.
Finally, let’s talk shirts. I’ve distributed about a third of them so far (find me to get yours!), and people have bought all the extras I ordered. But now that people are seeing the snazzy design and how nice and light they are for summer running, I’m getting requests for more. We’d need a minimum of 25 to place another order, and the price at that number would be a little higher at $25. If you’re interested, reply below and if we can get at least 25 people interested, I’ll move forward with an order page.
Good luck to everyone running Finger Lakes 50s tomorrow—I’ll be out volunteering and cheering. And remember, there’s always the FLRC 100K Ultra Challenge too—only Jami Landry, Paul Maza, and Damian Clemons have managed to complete it so far this year. Who will be next?
