Big Lake Half Marathon is Back!

It's official, the Big Lake Half Marathon is back on the calender for 2009. After hanging around on life support for a few months the good folks at Loco Running and NE Timing decided to give it life again.
Thank you.

And the Winner is......

Congrats to the Gate City Striders for winning the 25th annual Mill Cities Relay yesterday. This was our first Mill Cities win since 2000! Woo Hoo!
The light snow that fell most of the morning caused a few mishaps early on in the race and provided some slick roads for both runners and cars. By leg 2 most roads were fairly clear and running was much improved. Overall, a nice competitive day of racing. Complete results can be found here.

The top 5 running clubs were:

1. Gate City Striders (99)
   
2. Winners Circle Running Club (96)
3. Merrimack Valley Striders (77)
   
4. North Medford Club (75)
5. Somerville Road Runners (62)

Here's how GCS placed in each of the divisions:

• Male Open (2nd)
• Male Masters (3rd)
• Male Seniors (2nd)
  
• Male Veterans (1st)
  
• Female Open (4th)
  
• Female Masters (1st)
  
• Female Seniors (4th)
  
• Female Veterans (1st)
  
• Coed Open (7th)
  
• Coed Masters (2nd)
  
• Coed Seniors (2nd)
  
• Coed Veterans (none)
  

Our team (Mens Masters) was 6th overall (182 teams) and 3rd in the division behind SRR and WRT, finishing with an overall time of 2:40:36 (5:56 avg pace).

I ran leg 2 (2.5 miles) for the 1st time. This leg is about as flat as you can get. Footing was fine except for the last 1/4 mile on the bike path which was a little snow covered. I finished up in 14:14 (5:42 avg pace), passing one team early on and then closely following the eventual Mens Masters winning team (SRR) the rest of the short way to the finish.

Here's a pic (courtesy of Jim Rhoades) of me handing off to Joe Donnelly.



















Jim Rhoades has a bunch of pics on his site and I took some pics of GCS runners along the way. Enjoy!

Also check out Jim Hansen's MCR 2008 video on his site as well.