This year’s purple Challenge shirts are in! If you ordered one, I’ll be handing them out at the Duck Trails group run this Sunday, so it’s a great excuse to get both your shirt and an easy trail run with friends. And I’ll bring bagels.
The other big news from the week is that we opened two new ultra challenges: the FLRC Tough Trail Challenge and the FLRC Tough Tarmac Challenge. They essentially split the FLRC 100K Ultra Challenge, with each focusing on half the courses and requiring runners to finish in 12 hours. The leaderboard supports them with an Ultra Challenges page in the Reports menu. Congrats to Dennis Stadelman, who completed the Tough Trail Challenge on April 21, and to Steve Desmond, who finished it on Tuesday. Who will tackle these challenges next?
We’re up to nine finishers, with Patrick Milano and Kyle Reynolds adding their names to the Completions page. Don’t miss the new achievement badges on athlete pages for those who have completed all ten courses or an ultra challenge—more badges may be coming. Tristan Lambert remains on deck with nine completions due to travel, and coming out of nowhere (and doing a great job of conquering some initial frustration) is Jane Cogger with eight completions. As I write this, we’ve logged precisely 800 runs, and the numbers are almost perfectly split between men and women this year.
As far as photos go, I’ve really enjoyed all the fly-bys that occurred this week as Challengers met each other on the trails or at the start/finish spots. It’s always appropriate to ask someone you meet if they’re running the Challenge, and if they aren’t, recruit them! Treman Trailipop was a party last week, with Marie Fitzsimmons and Barbara Coon running into Banyan Love for this photo, along with Jessica Daily out on the trail.
Remote Sweet 1600s keep coming in, with Damian Clemons notching the farthest from Ithaca so far, with this 200m outdoor track in Rome that’s 4,323 miles away. Rebecca Lambert and Tristan Lambert get bonus points for running on the same downtown track in Toronto that Tonya and I ran on in 2022.
Finally, welcome to Adrian Kresock and Joel Kresock, who completed Duck Trails for their first Challenge course. Clearly, they understand this whole posing-for-photos thing.
Until next week, keep covering the ground!