- The Arlington Memorial Bridge has reopened after more than two years of rehabilitation that limited sidewalk access and prevented the Credit Union Cherry Blossom Ten Mile, Army Ten-Miler and the Rock ‘n’ Roll D.C. races from using the bridge for their courses.
- Montgomery County Parks will not close Little Falls Parkway to traffic on weekends during the winter months, owing to the labor involved in setting up four roadblocks. Feedback can be sent to info@montgomeryparks.com or 301-495-2595.
- The DCSAA is delaying the start of sports, with indoor track now scheduled to start practices Feb. 1 and cross country scheduled to begin March 8.
- Jazmine Fray who runs for the District Track Club, was a guest on the Keeping Pace podcast.
- The District Track Club recently redesigned its website, which includes a merchandise sale through Dec. 20 to help fund the middle distance team and free educational materials for runners.
- Georgetown alumna Rachel Schneider ran 31:09.79 for 10k at the Sound Running Track Meet to meet the Olympic standard of 31:25.
- Heritage alumna Weini Kelati, the defending NCAA cross country and 5k champion, left the University of New Mexico early to run professionally for Under Armour’s Dark Sky Distance team.
- Georgetown alumnus and former coach Chris Miltenberg was a guest on the Morning Shakeout podcast.
When I cobbled together a few routes for the DMV Distance Derby, I arbitrarily said it would last through the end of 2020. It makes a lot more sense to have the term of the challenge last for an entire year, so as of right now, let’s go through April 30, 2021. By then, if reports are to be believed, COVID-19 vaccines should be reaching wide circulation and the road racing industry will likely have a clearer path forward for resuming operations. I may retire some underused segments at the end of the year, however, in favor of more popular or accessible routes.
View overall results for the first six months of the DMV Distance Derby here
The segment results are generally organized to fit compactly.
Keira D’Amato has made her own fun the last nine months, refusing to let her momentum from the Olympic Marathon Trials go to waste, even as the COVID-19 pandemic has transformed the racing landscape. This morning, she made her own race, and came out of it with an American record for the women’s-only 10 mile in 51:23. Janet Bawcom had set the previous record, 52:12, at the 2104 Credit Union Cherry Blossom Ten Mile, which she watched up close, holding the finishing tape.
A Cherry Blossom-managed race in Anacostia Park in Washington, D.C., dubbed by D’Amato the “Updawg Ten Miler,” drew Olympic Marathoner Molly Seidel of Boston, locals Susanna Sullivan and Bethany Sachtleben (now of Boulder) and Flagstaff-based Emily Durgin. But D’Amato, an Oakton High School and American University alumna who lives near Richmond, was already two seconds ahead of Seidel roughly a quarter-mile into the race and wasn’t in jeopardy the rest of the way as she ran to a 2:13 margin.
Tom Martin isn’t sure what he’d do without the towers field in Bethesda, Md. Maybe his cross country runners would have to do more workouts on the track, he says. Maybe he’d even think about retiring from coaching. That’s how important the roughly 1.25-mile, grass-and-dirt loop around the WMAL radio towers is to him. It’s more than just a 75-acre field nestled between two highways and not far from Walter Johnson High School, where Martin coaches. It’s a crucial piece of the local running culture in Montgomery County.
“For me, it’s almost as if, when that goes away, I might consider retiring,” Martin says. “It’s invaluable just to have… this nice open space where we can do all different kinds of workouts. It would be a tremendous loss to our program.”
WTOP caught the four towers fall Nov. 4 at 6:30 a.m.
Though it hung around longer than usual this fall, the humidity seems to be receeding for the fall and winter, opening up conditions for some more pleasant attempts at the longer segments in the DMV Distance Derby.
Admittedly, last month’s addition of a 10k in the Arboteum was a little confusing – blame that on me making a wrong turn while putting the segment together. This month’s addition is simple – downhill on the Capital Crescent Trail, starting in Bethesda and finishing at the Key Bridge. It’s a few steps under 7.1 miles starting at Bethesda Avenue and ending under the Key Bridge. There are two things to keep in mind: the key bridge is under the Whitehurst Freeway past the trailhead gate and Little Falls Parkway is closed to traffic on the weekends, leaving one low-speed intersection- Dorset Ave, about a mile in, as the only major hazard.
View overall results for the first six months of the DMV Distance Derby here
The segment results are generally organized to fit compactly.
The bats are silent in D.C. at a time when a year ago, the Nationals were winning their first World Series. Instead, Oakton native and American University alumna Keira D’Amato is standing at home plate, pointing to the Washington Monument and calling her shot — an attempt at the U.S. 10-mile record in less than a month.
Backed up by the Credit Union Cherry Blossom Ten Mile team that she’s been working with for nearly a decade, D’Amato will run a small road race in the D.C. area Nov. 23 to try and top Janet Bawcom’s 52:12 time for a women-only 10-mile, which she set in 2014 at Cherry Blossom.
“It makes no sense, why I have the guts to go after it,” she said days prior. “But I’ve known since the spring I’m capable of running 52:12.”
D’Amato came close Oct. 28, splitting 52:37 en route to 1:08:57 at the Michigan Pro Half-Marathon, which she won. That performance made her the 10th fastest American woman at the half marathon.
George Alexander was somewhere new, all alone in front of a cross country race. He pulled away from the rest of the field in the red race at the Virginia Elite Invitational at Hanover County’s Pole Green Park, and he alone fought the wind that picked up throughout the day. He surged as he approached the three mile mark as the clock neared his PR of 15:52, crossing the line, flexing and expecting his time to be just under 15:50. The problem was, the was 5k.
“I guess I was mentally checked out,” he said. “I was ready for it to be over, and I was wondering why people were yelling at me to keep going.”
Alexander recovered and won in 16:16 with a 14-second margin over second place.
If it wasn’t for the eastern screech owl with one bad eye, I might still be unaware of the Patuxent Wildlife Research Refuge’s North Tract and its many miles of undulating dirt roads, a mere 25 minutes south of my home in Baltimore. An unseasonably hot and humid day in October 2017 resulted in a shortened run at Greenbelt Park. My wife and I had driven south on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway intent on logging 90-minute runs on Greenbelt’s principal loop and adjacent athletic fields, but the conditions exacerbated our training fatigue. We decided to cut our losses make the most of the afternoon by exploring the area.
A former West Point classmate needed a new kidney, and Dave Ashley did a blood test to see if he was a match.
After further testing, it turned out he was. But when he tried to research whether he’d be able to keep doing endurance sports, which helped him with anxiety issues resulting from deployment, he wasn’t able to find answers.
“So I really had to make this decision kind of blindly, hoping that on the other end I’d still be able to do at least some of the activities that I’m really passionate about and are therapeutic for me,” said Ashley, now 46, who lives in Arlington.
This coming January will mark four years since the now-retired U.S. Air Force colonel donated his kidney — and he’s showing that living with one kidney isn’t stopping him as he completes athletic feats, from ultramarathons to bike rides.
Tristan Forsythe didn’t like what he was reading.
It wasn’t that there wasn’t enough writing about running out there, it just didn’t speak to him in a voice he recognized.
“The stuff that I enjoyed reading was personal stories from people inside the sport, rather than results, statistics and rankings,” he said.
Even when he got those stories, they were watered down, lost in translation.
In April, when he was home in Pittsburgh, his sophomore year at Georgetown interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, he was bored and contemplating the worst: starting another running blog. But instead of focusing on his own running, he decided to make what he always wanted to see — a window into the lives of other runners.
