The heat, rain, and tornados cut into our mileage this week, but several Challengers have done their part to make up for it and take us over 8,000 miles total. Kudos this week to Elizabeth Dawson, who became the third member of her family to complete one of our half-course challenges by joining her mother on the Tough Tarmac Challenge page. Also, Dennis Stadelman couldn’t resist coming down from Syracuse for his second Tough Trail Challenge completion—impressive running!
Also helping out was Melanie Smee, who broke our 18-day drought on overall Challenge completions by running the Freeville Fly-In course today to qualify for her medal. We’re now up to 23 finishers, and with another 15 people on deck with only one or two courses left. Plus, the indefatigable Pete Kresock appears to have run the Hammond Hill Hoctathon once yesterday and four times today!
Two quick administrative notes:
-
When running Valley Views, please park at the Brooktondale Community Center or Post Office on weekends, on evenings when Brookton’s Market has live music, or any time the market seems busy. They were a bit grumpy with one of our runners about taking up a parking space.
-
A short portion of the Black Diamond Trail on the Run Rabbit Run course will be closed July 15–22. You can reroute around on roads at the cost of an extra 0.15 miles.
This week, we had another rule question prompted by Bill Blessing’s mother, who arrived 90 minutes early for dinner, forcing him to cut a Run Rabbit Run short halfway and return to it after dinner. Last week’s explanation of why pausing your watch isn’t allowed didn’t consider such a long pause and raised the issue of whether the two segments could be combined. I decided that it’s acceptable as long the clock continues to run during the entire break and both segments start within the same day.
That raised the question of whether you could compete for most efforts on a course by, say, running half of Run Rabbit Run before work every day and half after work. The answer to that is no—the fact that you can keep your watch running during a pause is meant to deal with unexpected situations, not be a regular workaround for avoiding a long course. Since Bill didn’t expect his mother to be early, started both segments on the same day, and wasn’t trying to game the system to avoid running long, his instance was fine. Glad you asked?
Photos of the week go to Dennis Stadelman, who celebrated running Lindsay-Parsons backward without a map with a thoroughly delectable-looking ice cream cone.
Julie Barclay, Kim Jackson, and Tammy Walsky enjoyed the creek at the end of Treman Trailipop.
Dirk Swart also qualifies for his photo of the in-progress bridge over the ditch on FH Fox. Big thanks to former FLRC board member Charlie Trautmann for building it, and be careful going over until he’s done.
For weekend club running, you have options on both Saturday and Sunday. Tomorrow morning is FLRC’s Fillmore 5K up in Moravia, which counts as a Lakefront Loops completion. And then Sunday morning at 8:30, we’ll be meeting at the Lick Brook parking for a group run on the Treman Trailipop course. I’ll have the purple Challenge shirts there, so if you haven’t gotten yours yet, come and get it and run with friends, too.
Until next week, keep covering the ground!