Every Real Runner chases that one mark that they will carry long after the finish line. Personal Record! For the marathon, likely achieved in your late 20s to early 30s, you’ll carry it with you for the rest of your life.
The Valley 7 Lakes Marathon has been designed for personal bests. Our Nebraska USATF LDR Chair spent 5 days in Columbus, OH for the 2018 annual meetings. An entire day spent with his new buddies on the Road Running Technical Council. Old friend David Katz providing guidance, and rare insight. Another spent with Master’s LDR Chair Mary Rosado (one of my oldest and dearest friends) as we put together our bid for the 2020 Master’s Marathon National Championships. Tristan insisted his brain aged 35 years in less than a week.
I did a little digging around myself. Contacted my life long friend John Conley. He was founder and race director of the Austin Marathon. I seemed to recall a Special Offer he had made for his event back in the 1990s. Submit an application with your bona fide personal best within the last 18 months, on a record eligible course. If you failed to run faster than your listed best time, you received your entry fee back. Guaranteeing a personal best, I’m bringing that to the table at Sunday’s committee meeting.
The feedback from yesterday’s column was swift and evenly split. The entitled elite taking one position, the blue collars the other. One collared fella put it this way: “If I got in on appeal I’d have to carry that asterisk with me from now on”. My reply was that the entitled elite would not.
Runner’s World’s coverage of the finish, same as mine. This now the focus of national discussion. https://www.runnersworld.com/news/a25399451/olympic-trials-hopeful-crawls-at-marathon/
We’ll see how the appeals go for all the athletes that just missed.
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