Irv Newman hands the reins over to Phil Lang
Brent Ayer, the RRCA Eastern Director, is planning to announce Phil Lang of the Howard County Striders as the Maryland State Representative this coming week. Lang, who at thirty-seven, is one of the younger club presidents in the running community. Lang has been a competitive for some twenty years. With the enthusiastic support from a former state rep, Evan Thomas, Ayer, former Frederick Steeplechaser's President, and the RRCA board he volunteered for to take over the spot from retiring Irv Newman. Newman was also a former President, with the mammoth Montgomery County Roadrunners Club.

Lang expects the first year, at least, will be a learning experience and a time to establish some goals for the future. Hopefully he can help the clubs in this state work together even better than they do now while encouraging them to reach out to more and more runners who are not currently affiliated with the RRCA, especially high school age and younger children.

When questioned about the state of the Maryland State records, Lang replied. "The state records for age groups I have always thought should be 5 year age groups. The task of establishing and keeping an accurate list becomes more manageable at that point as well. I also feel that so many records where probably set back in the late 70's and throughout the 80's as there were some great races and great runners competing in this state back then. The results from so many of those races would be tough to find at this point I am guessing but should be researched. I do like the idea of having the list and would not mind helping monitor and compiling it but I am not willing to suggest that I could do the whole thing by myself as I am convinced the task is too big for me or any one person who still wants to do some running themselves."

There are more than twenty Running Clubs in Maryland ranging in size from twenty members to as much as 3800 members. One of the sure ways of knowing that you are following the right route to get to a race is by seeing the distinctive Maryland Running License Tags that runners can get for their cars. More than one thousand such tags have been issued.