Patuxent River Park in Upper Marlboro, Md. boasts more than 6,000 acres of nature trails and wildlife just ten miles off the Beltway.
Rockville’s Dylan Hernandez (2:26:02) and D.C.’s Madeline Hartlieb (2:57:52) were the first D.C.-area runners across the finish line at the 127th Boston Marathon.
Despite facing strong headwinds in the closing miles of the race, Hillary Bor broke the men’s American record for 10 miles at the Credit Union Cherry Blossom Ten Mile Sunday, running 46:11 for second overall. He trailed Ethiopia’s Tsegay Kidanu by three seconds. Bor ran the 3,000 meter steeplechase on the U.S. Olympic team in 2016 and 2020, finishing seventh in 2016. Greg Meyer set the previous record of 46:13 at Cherry Blossom in 1983. Results Photos
Once again, the race served as the USATF 10 mile championships, and Sara Hall won the women’s division in 52:37, finishing behind second overall Uganda’s Sarah Chalangat’s 52:04. Vienna’s Perry Shoemaker broke the American record for women ages 50-54 with her 1:00:37.
Reston’s Susanna Sullivan, last year’s overall winner, was the D.C. area’s top finisher in seventh place, running 53:25. D.C.’s Zach Herriott was the top local man, running 48:57 for 14th place. Herriott won the race’s virtual competition in 2020. Bethesda’s Ben Beach completed the race, having run each Cherry Blossom dating back to when the race was started by the D.C. Road Runners
The race’s 50th running brought a new focus to the 5k race, which had previously been held as an alternative to the 10-mile distance. The race was held a day earlier and moved to a flat course starting at Freedom Plaza, where Baltimore’s Johan Fagerberg (15:03) and D.C.’s Casey Greenwalt (18:13) each won their respective races.
- The Montgomery County Planning Board will hold a public hearing at 5:30 pm March 30 on the Liittle Falls Parkway road diet, which has closed two lanes of the road for a half-mile stretch, allowing for recreational use. The county planning staff has recommended the program continue.
- The Zoo Loop in Rock Creek Park is now open through 7 p.m.
- D.C.’s Tim Choi was a guest on the Micromobility DC podcast.
- The Road Runners Club of America honored several local runners through the 2022 National Running Awards program:
- Conroy Zien and Sarah Day for their role leading the Mongtomgery County Road Runners Club’s First Time Marathon program – Outstanding Beginning Running Program. Zien was named Best Running Coach in the 2015 Best of Washington Running.
- Kelyn Soong of the Washington Post – Excellence in Running Journalism. Soong wrote for RunWashington for several years.
- Jean Arthur of Silver Spring – Browning Ross Spirit of the RRCA.
Check out some mile seven photos from the Rock ‘n’ Roll D.C. Half Marathon. If you use any, please credit Charlie Ban/@RunWashington. Or be a jerk and don’t.
- Saturday’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Half Marathon will include changes to the latter miles of the race, with the finish moving to Judiciary Square from its longtime home at RFK Stadium. The start of the race will include a trip over the Arlington Memorial Bridge after several years away.
- The Potomac Valley Track Club was a close second at the USATF Masters Indoor Track Championships. Vienna’s Perry Shoemaker ran 10:07.36 to set an American record for the indoor 3,000 meters for the 50-54 age group.
- Registration has opened for this year’s Army Ten-Miler.
- The Chocolate City Relay is accepting applications for the group’s June 10 event around Washington, D.C. Apply here
- After its winter hiatus, the District Running Collective will resume its Wednesday night runs this week. RVSP here
- South Lakes’ girls 4×800 team finished second at New Balance Indoor Nationals.
Runners from local clubs including the D.C. Road Runners, Georgetown Running Club, Prince George’s Running Club, Montgomery County Road Runners Club and more raced the RRCA Club Challenge Feb. 26 on Howard County’s hilly 10-mile course. The Georgetown Running Club won the overall, women’s and men’s team competitions, along with overall titles for Sam Doud and Kerry Allen, who set the course record. Check out photos here
- The National Park Service will close East Potomac Park for one week in early December to divide the road on Hains Point to add a dedicated bike and pedestian lane to the inside half of the road.
- NPS will hold a virtual public meeting a 7 p.m. Dec. 6 to address planned safety improvements along Arlington County’s portion of the Mount Vernon Trail.
- The entry lottery for the Credit Union Cherry Blossom Ten Mile will run from Dec. 1-5.
- Herndon’s Gillian Bushee, McLean’s Thais Rolly and Good Counsel’s Leah Stephens qualified for the Champs National Cross Country Championship (formerly sponsored by Foot Locker).
- Georgetown’s women finished 10th and the men 31st at the NCAA DIvision I Cross Country Championships, with Washington Latin’s Luke Tewalt (Wake Forest) finishing 22nd and John Champe’s Bethany Graham (Furman) finishing 27th to lead D.C.-area natives. Gonzaga’s Gavin McElhennon (Johns Hopkins) finished 27th and George Marshall’s Sophie Tedesco (Chicago) finished 60th at the Division III championships.
- Division I
- 21 Maggie Donahue – Georgetown
- 27 Bethany Graham – Furman, John Champe
- 39 Grace Jensen – Georgetown
- 59 Chloe Scrimgeour- Georgetown
- 86 Sami Corman – Georgetown
- 123 Melissa Riggins – Georgetown
- 190 Chloe Gonzalez – Georgetown
- 216 Katy-Ann McDonald – Georgetown
- Division I
-
-
- 22 Luke Tewalt – Wake Forest, Washington Latin
- 77 Bryce Lentz – Air Force, Colgan
- 105 Derek Johnson – Virginia, Tuscarora
- 132 Parker Stokes – Georgetown
- 137 Antonio Lopez Segura – Virginia Tech, Colgan
- 150 Sean Laidlaw – Georgetown
- 171 Sam Affolder – Washington, Loudoun Valley
- 178 Camden Gilmore – Georgetown
- 184 Rohann Asfaw – Virginia, Richard Montgomery
- 210 Matthew Rizzo – Georgetown
- 225 Lucas Guerra – Georgetown
- 250 Abel Teffra – Georgetown
-
-
- Division III
- 60 Sophie Tedesco – Chicago, George Marshall
- 71 Sarah James – Lynchburg, Brentsville District
- 155 Katie Hirsche – Haverford, Edmund Burke
- 166 Genevieve Dibari – Pomona, Stone Ridge
- 202 Ilana Zeilinger – Bates, Georgetown Day School
- Division III
-
-
- 27 Gavin McElhennon – Johns Hopkins, Gonzaga
- 91 Aaron Bratt – Haverford, Walt Whitman
- 144 John O’Rourke – Catholic
- 160 Timothy Boyce – St. Lawrence, Northwood
- 187 Daniel Ferrante – Christopher Newport, Fairfax Christian
- 190 Sean Enright – Johns Hopkins, Sherwood
- 203 Sam Llaneza – Lynchburg, Brentsville District
- 262 Aidan Nathan – Case Western, Briar Woods
- 272 Tor Hotung-Davidsen – Lynchburg, Oakton
-
- Sidwell Friends alumna Taylor Knibb won the Ironman world championship 70.3 in St. George, Utah.
Jim Ehrenhaft has coached his share of fast runners in his career, but the runners who made up his DCSAA-winning St. Albans team have been ahead of the curve.
Senior Pierre Attiogbe and sophomores Sebi Hume and William Strong, the first (15:52), second (16:43) and fourth place (15:50) finishers, have all been varsity contributors since their freshman years, and those strong finishes, along with sophomore Laszlo Wolfe in 10th (17:43) and seniors John Rhee and Jack Thomas in 13th (18:01) and 14th (18:03) helped the Buldogs to their first DC title, a 30-54 win over resurgent Gonzaga.
“I’ve never had guys that are ready to race so early in their careers,” Ehrenhaft said. “We stress long-term development, and they all came from a middle school program that emphasizes moderation and enjoyment of the sport.”
That means Ehrenhaft’s job has to shift to motivating his young charges to do something besides increase their training load. During their freshman track seasons earlier in 2022, Strong and Hume won the DCSAA mile and two-mile titles while Attiogbe was recovering from a stress fracture.
“Kids can get so excited about it that they want more and more, but they’ve done a great job of being patient, looking at the long term,” he said.
Attiogbe ran away from the pack at the very start, and cruising to a 51-second victory at Kenilworth Park, a low-lying loop that was mud-free in the first time since the race has been held there starting in 2016.
“As long as I finished first, I was happy,” Attiogbe said. “That meant we’d have a good start with the team scoring.”
Having a strong team has made the season even more fun for Attiogbe, who’s had his share of individual accolades, including wins at the Maryland and Skip Grant invitationals and a close runner-up finish at the Milestat Invitational, where he ran 14:45 for 5k. He, Hume and Strong swept the top three places at the IAC Championship.
“We have a lot of people to work with, it’s not a one-man show. We’re a real team,” he said. “We’re a bunch of guys who want to get better, as long as we’re with each other.”
This season, Attiogbe has focused on his pre-race visualization, anticipating how much certain points of the race will hurt and preparing himself to overcome them. He’ll join his St. Albans teammate Damian Hackett at Cornell University next fall.
The St. John’s girls managed to withstand a bout with the flu to win their third straight title 50-56 over National Cathedral School.
“It tore through our boys team before WCACs, but we thought the girls dodged a bullet,” said coach Desmond Dunham.
The customary large pack of Cadets started out in the front, but by the second lap of the course, fatigue combined with a hot day started to take a toll. Georgetown Visitation sophomore Vivian Kelly broke free of the pack and ran away on the second lap, looking back slightly while tracing the curve on the far end of the course to check on her lead.
“I usually start out fast because I get a lot of motivation when people cheer for me when I’m leading, but I let other people take the lead this time,” she said. “We went slower than I would have liked, but I was able to finish a lot faster than I usually do. I was proud of my last mile.”
Her 20:12 was a 22-second lead over National Cathedral freshman Cecilia Wright, who was leading a charge of her own. She combined with sophomores Caroline Lee (fifth in 20:52) and Margot Benelli (sixth in 21:00) to start the Eagles’ scoring off strong, but even wounded, St. Johns’ depth was too much to overcome.
Senior Caroline Gotzman did manage to dodge the illness that befell her twin sister, and she moved up throughout the race to finish third in 20:41.
“That was great for Caroline to come through for us like that,” Dunham said. “A lot of times she’s overshadowed by Meredith, but she ran a tough, smart race that showed how much she’s learned over the years. “
Junior Jennifer Maxwell was next in ninth in 21:30, with classmate Nell Droege three seconds back in 11th. Seniors Meredith Gotzman and Sophie Mattheus finished 16th (21:39) and 18th (21:56) to get five Cadets in before the Eagles had their fourth.
“This championship is a story for the history books,” Dunham said. “We don’t mess around with fevers, so we just kept them hydrating and checking their temperatures, hoping we could time it right with people recovering or being able to race before things got bad.”
The cancelation of the 2020 cross country season meant the core St. John’s team that started its wining streak in 2019 couldn’t go for a clean sweap, but it didn’t dull the team’s ambitions. With enough time to rest and recover, the Cadets are hoping for a strong race the Nike Cross Nationals Southeast meet after Thanksgiving.
All alone on the Marine Corps Marathon course, Kyle King had a lot of time to think. Even as he led Jon Mott by a minute in the 16th mile, he reflected on the extensive research he had done on his rival, specifically Mott’s recent 2:17 at the Berlin Marathon.
“I stalked him pretty hard before the race, and he ran some 5:05s in his last 10k at Berlin,” King said. “I started hurting early on, my calf started acting up in mile 12, so I knew I didn’t have a safe lead because he was gunning for me. I was running scared from 16 to 23.”
While Mott, 35, had raced five weeks prior, King, 33, had spent all summer and fall in the California desert, where he’s a captain stationed at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center. Aside from his girlfriend accompanying him on a bike, he trained alone, but as he approached two 180 degree turns in miles eight and 17 on race day, he wanted to make sure he didn’t waste the chance to be seen.
“I needed to look like I felt fantastic,” King said. “If he knew how much I was hurting, I was in trouble. Some races, I feel like I’m floating until mile 18, but I was working really early on today. I wanted to exude confidence and strength.”
His 2:19:19 was the second-fastest finish in 25 years, three seconds behind a tie for the 10th fastest in the race’s 47-year history. Mott was roughly 3.5 minutes behind in 2:22:46.
King took the lead from the start, coming through two miles in just under 11 minutes.
“I didn’t want to go out any faster than 5:25s, but that was hard because I was excited to race, the weather was great and I was ready to go,” King said. “I thought he was going to cover my moves, but I guess he decided not to go with me.”
Mott is a Lakeland, Fla.-based coach and three-time Olympic Marathon Trials qualifier, and while he initially picked Marine Corps as a race he could try to win, the trip became as much about supporting the nearly two dozen of his athletes who were racing the marathon and 10k after he was invited to race Berlin in September.
“I ran the race that I thought would win it, but I had no idea what kind of fitness he was in,” Mott, 35, said. “I was playing defense, hoping he’d fade, but he never did. I thought I might be able to catch him, but by 20 miles I could tell he wasn’t coming back.
“It was the easiest marathon I’d ever run, but I couldn’t go any faster.”
While he took time off after Berlin to recover, Mott felt he was missing the 160-mile weeks that had carried him to that recent personal record.
King spent much of 2021 and early 2022 living in Alexandria while in officer training school at Quantico, and had planned to race the 2021 Marine Corps Marathon before the in-person race was canceled a month out. The disappointment led him to take drastic measures — running a 100k in Natural Bridge, Va.. He got a grip and focused on his road training, which led him to a win at the MCM Historic Half in May.
Fascinated by search and rescue, King initially planned to join the Coast Guard after graduate school, but found his skills weren’t in high demand. But the Marine Corps seemed like it would be a nice blend of amphibious operations, making for a challenging career. Several years later, the Good Boys Running Club in Denver reawakened his love for running.
He had planned to race Marine Corps in 2019, but was selected for the World Military Games, where he ran 2:16:56 for eighth place. He was the 2020 Marine Athlete of the Year after his 47th place finish in the 2020 Olympic Marathon Trials. Mott, coincidentally, was 47th in the 2016 Trials.
The King sought in the Marine Corps came into play during his run up to the marathon. A weeklong training exercise in the desert left him only nighttime to try to fit in any running, and an encounter with a rattlesnake put an end to that. After that, a trip to Big Bear Lake in California for a long run at altitude became a four-hour fiasco when the fire roads he planned on were closed, a detour took him through zealously-guarded private property and the way out means crossing rocks that threatened to wreck his ankle. It wasn’t the smoothest buildup, but he couldn’t argue with the outcome.
Experience breeds improvement for women’s winner Baker
The last time Chelsea Baker ran Marine Corps, it might as well have been half a lifetime ago. In a sense, it was.
Her 2019 effort, ending up in a 59th place in 3:22:48, run in a downpour that transitioned to a steam bath, was just three years into her running career, which stared when she joined the British Royal Navy.
“I wasn’t really athletic before I joined the military, but I got pulled into cross country,” Baker, 32, said. “This was my second marathon when I ran it in 2019.”
In the intervening years, the dearth of major competitions gave Baker time to develop as a runner, and by the time she got back to Arlington for the 2022 Marine Corps Marathon, she was confident and like King, fed off of that confidence to carry her to victory in 2:42:38, the ninth fastest time in a race history that has seen more churn than the men’s, with five other top-11 times run in the last 25 years.
Not that she knew she was winning from listening to the crowds.
“They must have gotten confused with the 50k, because people kept telling me I was in fourth or third,” Baker said. “I just tried to drown them out and focus on my own race. To come back and win this has been mind-blowing.”
The 50k started 40 minutes before the marathon, and women’s winner Melissa Tanner ran just fast enough that she finished 23 seconds ahead of Baker, too close for the finish line crew to stretch out the finishing banner again for Baker. While most runners want to make sure they have enough left in the tank to finish strong, particularly on an uphill final stretch like Marine Corps, Baker got to prove it when she went back and crossed the finish line again for her photo op.
She had some input into her race plan from her boyfriend Adam Stokes, who was the 2019 runner up.
“I knew I didn’t want to go out too fast, so I stuck to that plan and didn’t start hurting until mile 23. I absolutely loved it,” she said. “I might have run faster if I had someone on my shoulder pushing me.”
Now a Royal Navy team elder, it fell to Baker to stress the restraint her coach had preached, and she followed to success.
“It’s hard not to get caught up in the atmosphere,” she said.
Fun for the whole family
Ryan Udvadia’s work as an accountant stresses details, but there was one he forgot in the lead up to the Marine Corps Marathon — changing his wife’s last name on her registration after the Clifton Park, N.Y couple’s June wedding. Cara Udvadia, 25, will go in the record books as Cara Sherman, but her time — 2:47:08 for second among women, is just as sweet.
“After I graduated from college, I felt a little lost, not having a team with goals to work toward,” she said. “It was definitely an adjustment, but once my dad started coaching me, I felt like I was on the right track again.”
Now a few years into her career as a hydrological engineer for the U.S. Geological Survey and out of the pandemic, she’s back to the level of consistency she missed from college.
She started the race relaxed but found runners to keep her company from mile eight to 18.
“I felt smooth until mile 24.5,” she said. “If another woman would have caught up with me, I’m not sure I could have responded. But I see how people get addicted to this.”
The Udvadias, both University of Albany alumni, chose the race because of Ryan’s connection to it. In 2019, he made good on years’ worth of threats to run his first marathon with his grandfather, Frank Capone.
“When he was little, he used to call me an tell me he ran around the block,” Capone said. “Then he went on to run in high school and then college, but he would always tell me ‘Grandpa, you got me into running. I’m going to run my first marathon with you.’ I tell him I’m too slow, but he doesn’t care.”
The pair ran 4:52:18 in 2019, mostly in the rain, and Ryan realized he bit off more than he’d bargained for.
“It was so cold, it rained so much, but I’ll never forget running with my grandpa,” he said.
His 2:27:36 debut for a competitive effort was enough for hm to need a few days to commit to another, but his response to the crowds was undeniable.
“It hurt, but the crowds made all the difference,” he said. “Even when I was slowing down after 19 miles, every time I passed water stop, I’d speed right up. The energy from the cheers is real.”
Moving up
Bonnie Keating, 37, a Robinson Secondary School alumna, returned for another crack at Marine Corps after finishing fifth in 2019. A transplant to San Diego, where she is a strength and conditioning coach, she felt the temperature drop from California and spent most of the race trying to warm up.
“It wasn’t by design, I just couldn’t get myself going,” she said. “I just felt off, but it wasn’t all bad.”
She ran 2:47:47 for third, though she thought she was in fourth after she passed a woman in the last few miles.
“I had good miles here and there, but they didn’t stay consistent until after 18,” she said. “When they gave me a pass for the awards when I finished, I thought there had to be a mistake.”
Like Baker, she improved on her 2019 time, when she ran 2:55:03.
The 50k returned for its second running, with Davidson, N.C.’s Chris Raulli, 34, running 3:05:45 and Baltimore’s Tanner, 41 running 3:22:15.
Raulli ran his first sub-2:30 marathon, with hopes for a sub-3:00 50k, but his last five miles suffered.
Tanner finished third overall in her first Marine Corps race since the 2008 marathon, where she fell apart in Crystal City and was mindful not to do so again.
The winners in 2019, Arlington’s Mike Wardian, 48, (3:18:27) and Rockville’s Liz Ozeki, 34, (3:33:05) both finished second. Wardian felt like his potential finishing time was wide open, given his lower training volume since finishing a coast-to-coast run this summer. Ozeki was pleased to improve on last-year’s time, particularly after she hadn’t committed to the race until two months prior, her eyes on marathons and halves this fall. Dale City’s Jonathan Ladson, 31, (3:24:50) and Hagerstown’s Lauren Cramer, 38, (3:49:43) finished third, with Ladson holding second place until the final miles.
