Check out just shy of 5,000 photos from mile 5.5 of Saturday’s Rock ‘n’ Roll D.C. Half Marathon here. If you use them, please credit Charlie Ban and @RunWashington.
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As RunWashington’s email goes out on March 9, 2022, the race is underway at the Barkley Marathons in Tennessee. In 2017, then-Rockville, Md. resident John Kelly won the race held in the park across the road from where he grew up. Here’s a look back at that race. Kelly is competing again this year, he now lives in England.
As fog rolled rapidly though the Cumberland Mountains in Eastern Tennessee, it created a strobe-like effect as dawn was breaking. From a fire tower, Rockville’s John Kelly could be seen, then not seen, then seen again… climbing a long hillside cleared for power lines.
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After an odd mixture of make-up cross country seasons in the spring – somewhat recognizable in Virginia, an empty-tasting few weeks in Maryland, and nothing in Washington, D.C. – the sport resumed its normal fall schedule in 2021. Local teams took home state titles in Maryland (Poolesville boys and Walter Johnson girls), Virginia (Oakton boys and Loudoun Valley girls) and, of course, D.C. (St. John’s). Owen McArdle, Thaïs Rolly and Ava Gordon all made the national Eastbay Cross Country Championships.
The RunWashington coaches panel recently met and decided the post-season honorees: the All-RunWashington team, which includes the top 10 boys and girls in our coverage area, and seven more runners each in D.C., Maryland and Virginia runners. Our coverage area includes Washington, D.C.; Loudoun, Prince William, Fairfax and Arlington counties (and all independent cities therein); and Montgomery and Prince George’s counties in Maryland.
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The D.C. area will offer plenty of opportunities to join the biggest road racing day of the year. In 2019, these races combined for 22,863 finishers:
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Oakton didn’t exactly defy any laws of physics, but typically, losing five of your top seven from a state championship team means you should expect a rebuilding year. But like the hummingbird that probably shouldn’t be able to fly, nobody every told the Cougars that.
With a steady stream of six finishers between 18th and 37th, Oakton scored 83 points to Yorktown’s 88 to win the Virginia 6A championship at Great Meadow, seeing their results get better as the races got bigger. After losing the Concorde District by two points to South Lakes, they posted a 10-point win over the Seahawks at the Northern Region.
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The two-point loss at the 2019 D.C. cross country championships gnawed at the St. John’s boys team. They had closed the gap on Gonzaga from the WCAC Championships a week prior, but they still had cause for optimism. Most of the runners were underclassmen, and they could start looking ahead to the next fall.
Then the next cross country season was canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and all but one of those boys graduated or didn’t return two seasons later. It would be up to senior Nicolas Grabarz to exact his revenge.
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Two local college teams and a variety of other local runners won individual honors at college conference cross country meets last weekend.
Georgetown won its second straight Big East title in Indiana George Washington University’s women won their first Atlantic 10 Cross Country title Saturday in Ohio. Georgetown’s Maggie Donahue won the Big East individual championship, George Mason’s Annabelle Eastman won the Atlantic 10 individual championship and John Champe alumna Bethany Graham, running for Furman, won the Southern Conference individual championship.
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In a moment, Ava Gordon knew something was wrong.
While training over the summer, she took a breath and realized things weren’t quite right, which lead to a positive COVID-19 test and a few weeks off of running while she recovered.
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