Although the weathermen called for ongoing rain all day on Saturday, calm skies greeted thousands of runners to Central Park for the ill-named Healthy Kidney 10K Road Race. And with some of the top professional runners in the world present, along with it being the fourth team scoring race of year, the race clearly had a different feel than most NYRR affairs.
The Central Park Track Club had full squads competing in all age groups, and looked to solidify its place in the team standings. Unfortunately, while the NYRR took ample care of the elite runners, the regular race seemingly turned into an afterthought, as chaos ruled the first corral. While at the Brooklyn Half Marathon the NYRR did an excellent job ensuring racers lined up according to ability, on Saturday the one person in charge of handling the local elite entrance was clearly over-matched by the hundreds of iPod wearing joggers who wanted to sneak into the wrong corral.
Fortunately, things calmed down by the first mile, as the men s and women s team ran in groups as they tackled the tough hills early in the race. By the five mile mark, it was clear that the men s team was in a fierce battle with Urban Athletics for fourth place, while the women s team was truly destroying the competition, on route to a decisive victory.
At the finish line, newcomer Carl Dambkowski led the way for the team, impressively breaking 33 minutes on the hilly Central Park course. He was closely followed by Thom Little, Russel Pfeffer, Daniel Seidel and Eric Boucher. The men s group was incredibly tightly packed, as only 75 seconds separated the fifth and fifteenth finishers.
Unfortunately in the team competition, Urban Athletics pulled away in the end, so the team settled for fourth place. While only seventeen points separated the two sides, Urban Athletics first, second, third and forth place men beat our first, second, third and fourth place men respectively, making the score seem slightly closer than it was in actuality.
David Dorsey led the way for the master s team, followed closely by Alan Ruben and Hank Berkowitz. The master s team scoring was incredibly tight, as less than 30 seconds (ten seconds per guy) differentiated the top four teams. While the NYRR scores the open events based on place, they score all master s races on cumulative time. Under these new master s scoring rules, CPTC couldn t capitalize on its depth, and settled for fourth place.
Throughout the final mile, first CPTC women Katy Masselam was in a three-way battle for third place. And with the top three women receiving free trips to the United Arab Emirates, the stakes were high to land on one of those coveted top three spots. Unfortunately, Katy finished in fourth place, which was still a very impressive performance just six days after racing a 25K in Michigan. Andrea Costella showed no effects of her recent injury as she placed eighth overall. One place after Andrea was Felice Kelly, who was closely followed by Sarah Alaei and Lauren Esposito. With Allison Lind finishing in fourteenth place, that gave CPTC six of the top fifteen women.
Thanks to the new NYRR results database, we can see how well the club stacked up this year compared to our club s performance in previous years. This is the third year the NYRR has put on the Healthy Kidney 10K, but in 2005 it was not a scoring race, so let s compare this year s results to last years (note: last year s weather was fairly similar to that on Saturday: cloudy with below normal temperatures). Amazingly, the team scores for both the men and women were incredibly similar. Last year, the men scored 186 points, while this year they scored 188. Will Berriel led the way for the team last year with a spectacular time of 31:58, a good 54 seconds better than our top finisher this year. However, we greatly improved on our two through ten spots this time around. Last year, the spread of time between our first and fifth runner (commonly known as a team s delta), was exactly two minutes. This year, we improved our team delta to fifty-six seconds. We also improved on our spread between our first and tenth runners. Last year, our 1-10 delta was 3:33, while this year our 1-10 delta was 1:45. Anything under two minutes is a great 1-10 team delta, and clearly shows the depth of the squad!
Now, let s take a look at the women s side. The women scored 54 points in 2006, and bettered that by 10 points this year, scoring 44. Katy Masselam led the team both this year and last year, but improved her time by 47 seconds in this year s race. The team s delta in 2007 was 2:13, slightly worse than last year s exceptional delta of 1:28. Expect to see a more detailed analysis of historical results in future races, especially those that have a longer, more storied history.
With the race over, everyone relaxed and enjoyed the awards ceremony, as Dathan Ritzenheim got showered with accolades for winning the race and setting a new course record in the process.
There are a few weeks off in the team scoring schedule, as the men and women have separate races next time around. The women race another 10K on Saturday, June 9th, in the New York Mini road race. The men compete eight days later at the Father s Day 4 miler.