There is something very nice about being able to jog to a race as part of your warm up. The Scarecrow 5k starts in front of the Fairport town hall exactly 1 mile from my house, so on Saturday morning I packed my racing flats into my little running backpack and shuffled out to meet Kenny and Joe.
This weekend was actually an Upstate XC series race weekend, but we couldn’t get 5 people to commit to racing in Buffalo and it looks like only Syracuse Track Club ended up fielding an open men’s team at that meet. I’m not sure what it says about the state of the series that even the hosting team didn’t have a team. It just so happens that the Scarecrow 5k has a team scoring component that only requires 3 runners so we focused our attention on winning a bit closer to home.
The race is a flat fast course that finishes with a mile and a half stretch on a paved section of the Erie Canal Trail. The only downside to the course is you can see a big brick smoke stack that marks the finish line pretty much from the time you turn around and head to the finish. It is a little depressing to be able to see the finish for 8 minutes, it seems like it just never gets any closer. Last year you may remember that the 3 people ahead of me made a wrong turn and I had to stop and yell at them to get them back on course. Well this year I had 3 people in front of me, Mark Streb-again, Kenny Goodfellow-again, and Todd Meyer replacing Mark Andrews (both Todd and Mark made the US Olympic trails for the marathon about a decade ago). Everyone went the correct way this time, maybe because I assured Mark Streb that if he took a wrong turn this year I wasn’t going to save him.
Kenny kept his string of great races going, setting a new 5k PR of 15:54, but Mark Streb managed an impressive 15:46 for first. I say managed and impressive, because he raced the Wineglass Marathon last weekend. I managed an unremarkable 16:27 for 4th place, while Joe dropped 30 seconds from his time last year and ran a 18:37. Overall Results.
In a very competitive team race, Roadkill Racing eeked out first place by 238 points over the other 16 teams. I’m particularity proud of the fact we beat the cross fit team by 1534 points. For our winnings we got 4 certificates for a family night of bowling at AMF Fairview Lanes. Each certificates gives us 2 hours of bowling for 6 people including shoes, popcorn and a pitcher of soda. Obviously there will be a Roadkill Racing bowl-off in the very near future. Team Results
Next up is the Finish Strong 5k and then back to cross country.