2008 Roxbury Race #31

Holmes snags first win

So does Nagamatsu

    This week's Roxbury Road Race featured first-time winners for both men and women.  

    Haley Nagamatsu is running her first season at Roxbury, and only her third race of that season, but this week she went home the winner with her 59-second victory over Rapid Lynn Zuback.  

    As for the men, Wesleyan University in Middletown has been home to a number of great runners.  There was the beloved Amby Burfoot, winner of the Boston Marathon in 1968 and now one of the best-known writers for Runners' World.  Jeff Galloway, 1972 Olympian and marathoning guru for tens of thousands of aspiring distance runners, also attended Wesleyan.  And perhaps America's most famous distance runner, Bill Rodgers, hails from Wesleyan as well.  But none of them ever won a Roxbury race.  This week's winner, a science professor there, did what the others have thus far failed to do.*  Indeed we have the following account of the front end of the race, as observed by the guy sometimes best known as "Amanda's and Collin's uncle":

Hi Ed - 

Here are the results...  

I had a good view of the race today - The race started out with a lead pack of about 6, with Bruce Goulart taking an early lead going down South St., as the pack spread out.  About midway on the River Rd portion of the route, Dan Germain, Mike Abraham, and Scott Holmes caught up to and passed Bruce.  Going up the Jeep Trail, Scott Holmes opened up a lead on Dan and Mike.  Going up Rocky Mountain and down Hemlock, Scott gradually extended his lead, which was never in doubt once the Jeep Trail portion was complete, and Dan Germain extended his lead on Mike Abraham for second

place

That's it!

Chris (with the race commentary) and Larry

* In fairness, we should mention that onetime Roxbury Regular John I. (for Ishmael) Chesto graduated from Wesleyan, but he had already won in Roxbury, running as a high school student at Pomperaug, when he went there.

    This week's course featured an unusually long climb, starting near river level at the corner of River Road, about 320 feet above sea level, then climbing up past 650 feet as we went past the top end of Chalybes.  Even the top of Ranney Hill Road is only about 660 feet, though, truth be told, Painter Ridge Road takes up to 860 feet.  Bottsford takes us to only about 660 feet, and the lowest we ever go is about 260 feet when we occasionally cross the Shepaug River on Minor Bridge Road or loop back on Falls Road when we do the 6.4 mile course.

    But Roxbury races always feature hills.  This week we also featured Water Stops!  Thank you Charlie Euston!

John Cramer

  Many years ago, Fossil was running a Tuesday evening race series in Como Park in St. Paul, Minnesota.  Fossil had a good day and he broke the course record on the 2.8 mile course by about four seconds. The officials were incredulous.  "You can't break that record!" they protested.  "That's John Cramer's record!"  

    John Cramer, it turns out, is a legend in Minnesota.  He'd just set a national record for the marathon, indoors on a dirt track.  He'd run 2:32 on a sand-pit of a track in a WWII airplane hangar-style building at the University of Minnesota.  He'd organized hundreds of races, and every runner in the whole state knew him and liked him.

    About ten years later, Fossil lived in Springfield, Massachusetts and John started turning up at their Tuesday evening races.  Fossil and John were fairly evenly matched, and they became good friends.  It was the peak of the Running Boom in the 1980s, John was running one of the new running stores at a local mall.

    John's store had a bit of a shoplifting problem.  One day, John spotted a culprit in action and started running after him.  The guy took off like a shot, far faster than an aging marathoner could move, but John managed to keep the guy in sight, and eventually to close the gap. John was smart and didn't close too fast.  Indeed, the more times he tells the story, the longer he made the poor shoplifter run.  It was nearly a mile the first time I heard the story, and after a couple of years it had grown to three miles.

    Needless to say, when John caught him, the guy was almost too tired to stand up.  John turned him over to the police, took back his shoes and went back to work, not even breathing hard. 

    He got reprimanded for taking the law into his own hands.  About a year later, John got transferred back to his beloved Minnesota, where he's still running and still organizing races.  

    His store doesn't have a shoplifting problem.  The bad guys have heard the story, too.

Pictures

     The Roxbury Races are now listed on the Internet both on RunningInTheUSA and on HiTekRacing.com.  For information contact Bob Lewis at ctstaterunner (at) yahoo (dot) com, or at 203 240 0162.

Last week's results (2.4 miles - down Chalybes)      

Next week (when available) (4.3 miles - High Bridge Road) 

Current points standings

Week 31

    The Top Ten this week were pretty stable.  All ten of them ran, so there were no big moves.  There was a small move when Brian Gildea beat Scott Benjamin by 14 places and took over 9th place by an 8-point margin. 

    Joe Mendes shaved another point off the Fossil's overall lead, and now sits 85 points back with 10 races to go.  

    In the table below, runners who have not missed a race yet this year are marked with a *.  Rookies, those running their first Roxbury race of the season, are marked with an "R", and people reaching 100-point milestones are marked with a C.  People whose ages were different this week than they were in our data base are marked with a B.  If everything in the data base works perfectly, this means they had a birthday recently, but we know the data base isn't perfect.