• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

1 2019 Fall Runner Rankings Better Weather; Record number of Events Most competitive Fall Ever (September 3, 2019 – November 10, 2019) 50 Plus Club Best of 2015 Best of 2016 Best of 2017 Best of 2018 Best of 2019 Best of 2020 By James Moreland The Regional Runner Rankings is looking for more sponsors and contributors. We want to acknowledge the help, support, and financial contributions from the Friends of the Rankings: • Potomac River Running • Patricia Kelbaugh Dance Studio 2 • Michael Mason of Horizon Landscape, established in 1969 in Silver Spring, serves Montgomery, Prince George's, and Howard counties. Horizon provides specialized gardening, clearing, forest improvement and landscaping services throughout the year. If you need assistance with your property, contact us online or at (301) 421-1800 and we will send you a landscape gardening expert to help create or maintain your outdoor paradise. • Alice Franks • Dan Devlin • Jerry Browne • Tommy Mason • Elena Mason • Fredericksburg Area Running Club • Jim Noone • RELS Landscaping Supply • Rachel Mason • TLC Daily Money Mentor, LLC • 2019 Celtic Solstice 5M ***************** With a B.S. & M.S. in Accounting Meryl Schaffer brought TLC Daily Money Mentor, LLC to fruition. The summit point, being the need to nurture individuals, families, senior citizens, and small businesses. Add her integrity, understanding, and compassion, there is another layer of protection from fraudulent activity and peace of mind that better financial decisions are being made. ***************** 3 RELS Landscaping Supply. We are proud to serve central Maryland, carrying landscaping materials such as mulch, compost, and topsoil for lawns and gardens, as well as trees, flowers, and shrubs. We also carry hardscape products including concrete pavers, boulders, flagstone, and natural wall stone. We have locations in Frederick, MD, Silver Spring, MD and Martinsburg, WV. ***************** Patricia Kelbaugh Dance Studio 1976-2020 • Ballet • Tap • Jazz • Lyrical • Pointe Ages 3 to Adult All Levels: Beginner to Advanced 301-840-1849 E-mail: [email protected] www.pkdances.com 4 2 Professional Drive, Suites 218/219, Gaithersburg, MD 20879 Member of Dance Masters of America, Inc. Certified by test to teach, B.S. Degree Thirty years ago when I started running, the focus was beginning to shift from a pure sport to a recreational opportunity to stay fit and meet people. Running has always been a secondary sport, largely because the focus is on the individual, not a team. While there is officially only one winner, as men and women’s race are two separate events, everyone in the race can be defined as a winner on their own. The Personal Record defines what the runner did for themselves with the competition being internal. While the world records continue to come, the second level of competition is eroding to the point that older runners are scoffing. Women have become an increasing presence and are dominating in total attendance at the events. Older women, who have been racing for decades, are showing the most improvements. Finally, in the last couple of years, there seems to be some attention from the young people. Most of the time only a small handful of dedicated athletes have stopped the master runner from dominating in races. Running is age based more than any other sport. Only the truly gifted and motivated racers can hope to maintain against young, even for a short while. If you can run as fast as you did last year, you are really better. Five-year age groups were established to even the playing field and de facto create multiple mini events. Runner want to know how they did in their age group. Back in the 80s, runners such as Bill Osburn, who died this year at the age of 95 and Alvin Guttag, who died in 2012 at the age of 94, railed against the discriminatory sixty and older age group. It was as if the five-year age group stopped applying there. Race directors claimed no older runners came to their races. Yet it was the chicken or the egg. An elite eighty-year-old cannot compete against even the average sixty-year-old. Cokey Daman, who passed on September 21 of this year at 100 years of age, held more than a dozen state records. Still, he had no chance against novice runners who might be decades younger than him and listed in the same age grouping. As we reach the oldest runners, even five-year age groups are too much with times slowing yearly by nearly as much as the demi-decade. Race timing has been taken over by the computer. Directors add many useless pieces of data, merely because they can. Much of it is driven to bring in more runners. In the early days, the competition was pure. By the 1980s, the majority of races were charity driven. “Come and donate your money to our worthy cause and we will time your running.” A vast majority of events objected to giving back anything but a pittance to the runners, claiming the event was for the charity. Eventually some events such as the Race for the Cure admitted to this by doing away with the running all together. We just want your money and you can run if you must but we just want your money. 5 Racing is getting away from the charities though they still want your money. However, the successful events give back to the runners. For years, many runners were intrigued by the marathon. Many never did know the distance of the race but the mystic brought them out by the thousands. If you ran a 5K, no one was impressed unless you had a fast time. If you finished a marathon, you were special regardless of time. It did not take long until many of these joiners found out that it was partly true. Finishing a marathon is a daunting task. Marathons all over the country were fast on the uptake and quickly added a half marathon to their event. Now you could brag about a finish that you could more reasonably expected to make. Note that the 10K, 8K, and even the common 5K have, in more recent years, been added to marathon, now called a running festival. Many runners are happy to pay for someone to create a course and a sense of comradery that allows them to overcome inertia and get out on the roads. Their races are really training runs. The lore of the loneliness of the long-distance runner is passé. Running is still one of the least expensive sports but do not fool yourself. If you plan to race a lot you may spend thousands of dollars a year. One addicted racer, Bill Stahr, raced 369 times (2014), currently the world record. His gas money alone was in the thousands of dollars. Race entries fees doubled that amount even though many of his races were running club events. Many club events are free or at a very low cost. Still, some clubs have thousands of members yet attract hundreds at best to their event. The newest running model is the Park Run. This started in England and since 2016 has been sweeping across the USA. There are seven such events in the region. They are run virtually every Saturday and they are free. The numbers of runners are leveling off after increasing every year since the turn of the century. The numbers of races continue to climb. The region has many thousands of races. The successful ones, the sustainable ones offer value to the runner. The basics of a good race is good management. The race must have quality control over the distance of the event and the course marshalling of the event. To have the award winners determined, the event must have credible timing equipment. Runners want results quickly and accurately. This is readily possible for even the largest races if the race management is amenable to the integrity of the event. Runners know what they ran. Virtually every runner has a GPS timing device and knows their time and how close the race was to the promised distance. They also want to know how they did in comparison to the rest of the field. Naturally, not everyone understands the mechanisms to get those results; race management should. The results should include at a minimum the runner’s name, age, gender, hometown, and gun time, and be sorted by the gun time. 6 Races will at times have many others things such as net time, place in gender, place in division, or a video of the finish. In a survey of Web site quality of close to a hundred racing sites, a mere nine of them got a 90 percent or better rating and just fourteen more received an 80 percent rating. Major races leveled at fifty races. Total race times dropped 20 percent to levels not seen in a decade with 160,404. Total races exploded to the highest ever with 429 and there were one hundred and fifty additional races with no qualifiers, totally nearly ten thousand runners. Races come and go with close to a hundred races disappearing from 2018. The Army 10 Miler is the big daddy of the five races with more than 5,000 finishers. Army cracked the 25,000-runner mark to lead the way. Also, with more than 400 ranked runners, there were three times as many ranked times as the second-best race. When you count Marine Corps Marathon with a 10 percent drop off to 18,510 and their 10K still solid with 6,248, the Corps comes out just short with 24,756.

Load more

  58

Copy Link