John Riker, who recently graduated from T.S. Wootton High School, started writing for RunWashington in 2018 and is now a student at Northwestern University. He recently wrote about the new power line trail in Montgomery County. Read more of his writing here.
Name: John Riker
Rockville resident Lokesh Meena ran an Indian and Asian record for the indoor marathon at the Grant-Pierce Indoor Marathon June 24. He won the race at the Thomas Jefferson Community Center in 3:13:19.
The Atlantic 10 Conference has nominated Sherwood alumna Grace McDonald for the NCAA Woman of the Year award. McDonald ran track and cross country at the University of Dayton and was active in several extracurricular activities before graduating this Spring.
The midway point of 2018 is a good time to check your runner ranking and make sure your results are showing up for all of the races you’ve run. To qualify for the year-end rankings, you will have had to have run three ranked races in the first six months and three in the second six months.
Alexandria’s Kyle Northrop talks about his race at the Western States Endurance Run in late June.
For most high school students, summer is a time to kick back, relax and finally turn off that annoying alarm clock. But for runners on the Northwest cross country team in Germantown, the summer season is when they set the alarm clock even earlier. The team holds summer practices on weekdays at 5:30 a.m., just before sunrise.
“At the beginning it’s so difficult,” senior Marissa Branham admitted. “You know that it’s supposed to be summer and here I am waking up earlier for practice than I do for school. I wake up around 5 to get ready and when I drive to school it’s literally still dark out. But by the time I warm up and stretch, I’m pretty much awake and ready to run so it’s not that bad. At the beginning it’s hard, but you get used to it after a few weeks of waking up at 5 a.m.”
When Charles J. Colgan, Sr. High School opened last year, there were no championship banners hanging in the gymnasium. No trophies lined the trophy cases. No records existed to be broken by ambitious younger generations. Traditions, legends, the stuff of student mythology was yet to be written. So when administrators chose to field a varsity cross country program in the school’s first year, there was only potential before them.
They hired Dave Davis and Bill Stearns, two of the most accomplished coaches in local running, to build their team. Davis was a 2012 finalist for the Brooks Inspiring Coaches award and was inducted into the Virginia High School League Hall of Fame in 2011. He has won seven state titles to Stearns’s five. Stearns, for his part, has coached a Marine Corps Marathon winner, state and national champions, and All-Americans across his career. With Davis’s longtime assistant coach Melissa Tirone rounding out the leadership, they formed a kind of coaching dream team. Their task? Develop their athletes until they could challenge any of the other eleven schools in Prince William County.
Finding that extra bit of motivation to conquer long runs during marathon training can be a struggle. It’s easy to find yourself running the same routes repeatedly, or seeing the same sights and people nearly every weekend.
Cristina Lopez found herself in this exact situation, but desperation bred inspiration and a run she won’t soon forget.
Update: Of the 14 local-ish Western States entrants, 13 finished, led by Jared Byrd’s 22:09:10.
Three local Olympic Marathon Trials qualifiers, two on the world junior track team, a new running specialty store opening in Ashburn and a local runner appears on a podcast.
Chantilly alumnus Sean McGorty won the NCAA 5,000 meter championship a little over a week ago.