Bethany Graham has plenty of reasons to fuel her running with frustration.
Despite brilliant starts to the past two cross country seasons, she hasn’t made the state meet since her freshman year. Stress fractures in 2017 and a sprained ankle in 2018 have kept her out of postseason racing.
Now that a lot of the Fairfax County running gang was back together at the Monroe Parker Invitational, Albert Velikonja decided to see who had done their homework over the summer.
A mile and a half in to Burke Lake’s 2.98-mile course, he surged, and looked around to see how it all shook out.
A race medal is a symbol of achievement; a shiny token signifying a goal achieved. While these medals seem like a small part of an event, race teams put a lot of thought into them — everything from shape, design and ribbon color — to drive home the theme of the race and its significance in runners’ lives.
The Parks Half Marathon uses its medal as a marketing and branding opportunity, said Race Director Don Shulman. The Montgomery County race is often the first half marathon for a lot of its participants, so Shulman said the medal is vital because of the pride finishers have for it.
For the sixth year, RunWashington’s coaches panel has chosen 62 of the most promising cross country runners in the Washington, D.C. area, naming them to our preseason honor teams.
The panel prized cross country achievements from last fall, but took into account improvement during the track season when selecting the teams. The top 10 boys and top 10 girls, regardless of geography, assemble the All-RunWashington team. Coaches also selected an additional team for Washington, D.C., Northern Virginia and Montgomery and Prince George’s counties in Maryland.
As a gregarious extrovert, Roman Gurule met a number of his friends through happy hours and dinners during his time as a federal government employee. He joined his colleagues whenever they drank alcohol and Gurule went out about five times a week to relieve stress from work. It felt like a normal thing to do, even if he would wake up the next morning with a pounding headache and a scant memory of what happened the previous night.
He repeatedly told his friends he would cut back on his self-proclaimed “rockstar lifestyle” that he started after college, but then it would happen again the following weekend. And the next. “I think that nobody took me seriously,” Gurule says.
Spot her two letters and Fairfax’s Bethany Sachtleben can rearrange her name to spell “schedule.”
Caroline Alcorta had an even bigger lead than anyone expected. She came into the 2013 Virginia AAA track championships with a 3200 season’s best more than 10 seconds faster than anyone else. And with a half mile to go, she had what West Springfield coach Chris Pellegrini estimated was a 20-second lead.
“I heard people around me saying she had it in the bag, but with that weather, I just wasn’t sure,” he said, more than six years later.
Marathoning remains popular among D.C. area runners, but the number of domestic marathon finishes dropped 7.5 percent in 2018, down to 12,981 from 14,044 in 2017.
At the same time, the number of those marathons dropped to 686 in 2018 from 704 in 2017. As you would expect, the Marine Corps Marathon topped the list with 5,053 local finishers. On the other end, 400 races had no local runners, while 67 had just one. There were likely more, but 147 races did not report the residences of their finishers, many of which were smaller races far from the D.C. area.
Willy Fink came into Saturday’s D.C. Road Runners Track Championship wanting to accomplish something great. He accomplished something monumental.
Competing in a heat with nine runners who had previously broken the four minute mile barrier, Fink led from wire to wire at D.C.’s Dunbar High School and ran the first sub-four minute track mile recorded on D.C. soil (3:58.84). The race had its share of drama, however. Instead of the quick pace many spectators and athletes anticipated, the field started off conservatively and kept the audience in suspense as to whether the four-minute barrier would actually be broken.
Even as the number of male American milers to hit that mark approaches 550, a sub-four-minute mile is still a middle distance runner’s milestone, bolstered by the stark difference between 3:59.99 and 4:00.00. For the 65 years men have been running sub-four miles, nobody has done it in Washington, D.C.
With a loaded field, that may change July 13 at the D.C. Road Runners Track Championship, when the race’s momentum, a national developmental effort and new track league converge at Dunbar High School. Eight men entered in the mile have broken 4:00, with Trevor Dunbar’s 3:55.54 PR leading the way. A field of more than a dozen women will race the 1,500 meters, several chasing the world championships qualifying standard of 4:06.50. Elinor Purrier (4:02.34) and Shannon Osika (4:06.17) have met the standard, with four more runners within two seconds. Abbey D’Agostino Cooper, a 2016 Olympian at 5,000 meters, is a late entry. Georgetown alumna Katrina Coogan and Lake Braddock alumna Katy Kunc will race in the elite field.