The lesser glare of a year’s early events can let us see the fire of new stars in the orange firmament.

Or, for those who still can’t focus after opening their year-end IRA statements, without Yasuhiro Makoshi and Tom Phillips, and with Jill Vollweiler on a track somewhere, we have the time to put our hands on our hips and nod respectfully at other speedy folks.

Allan Piket for example. Allan, a nominee for multi-sport athlete of the year, set an age-graded PR at the five miler on January 10^th, with a time of 30:56, or 74.6%. The most impressive part is that that is just about the fastest 5-miler Alan has run in Central Park, despite eight years and 71 races in the books. To me, that kind of masters performance is the most heartening – setting absolute PRs or close to it, even after that many years of competition.

Most of us at some point have a long gap in our racing history – when we were having babies, living in Nepal, or maybe working 95 hours per week in a former industry called ‘investment banking.’ Robert Howard last PRd in a 5-miler in CP during the first Clinton administration, but came back in the Fred Lebow Classic with his fastest age-graded time since 1995.

Michael Rennock, while no stranger to this page, has taken an early leadership role on the masters road team. While not quite up to mid-season peak performance yet, the CPTC award nominee has been the best performing male masters athlete for two straight races.

On the women’s side, the only supernova to report is actually the same one that has been glowing for years – Sylvie Kimche continues her streak, confounding all others in her age group, by winning the 5-miler, for the 36^th time in 40 races, going back to approximately the Jean Chretien administration. 

However, no woman set an age-graded PR in the five-miler or half-marathon. In fact, only one masters woman lined up at the start of the half-marathon. Maybe they took investment banking jobs at First National, Kathmandu. 

dgreenb300@aol.com