The story this month is the same as it was last month: Sylvie Kimche has continued to show the same fine form through late summer as she did in midsummer. Sylvie has won two races since I spoke to her after club champs, improving her age-graded percentages each time, peaking out at a world-class 94.5% (6:13) at the Fifth Avenue Mile. While I have used my self-awarded rights to discount age-graded results for the mile because they seem to convert awfully high, Sylvie gave us another mark at which we can marvel: at the four miler on September 12, Sylvie ran the best age-graded score of the year, male or female: 88.2%. Only the legendary Rae Baymiller has run a better CPTC age-graded score over the past couple of years in a race over a mile: 93.7%.
To my lactic acid and ice cream addled mind, it seems to me one lesson of masters athletics Sylvie and Yumi Ogita have shown us this year is that when you start to run well, you have a good shot at lining up a few good consecutive races. Without exception, after I profile an athlete because of a great performance, he or she has gone on to run even faster. Running is streaky, and when you start to see results, go for it. And remember the prime rule of masters running: you can always go faster than one year before. Last year, Sylvie was running 7:38 pace over four miles and now she is down to 7:19, and Yumi had a similar speeding up.
Another of our masters teammates, 56-year-old Yasuhiro Makoshi, has also managed to run faster than the previous year: he ran 6:01 pace for the September four miler, while last year he ran 6:05 pace. Yasuhiro has continued to race almost every weekend, to the consternation of the competition, as he won the Queens Half, Percy Sutton 5k, and most notably the NYC Half.
Yasuhiro has had the most age-group success lately with his three wins, but orange runners have taken home chests full of treasure lately. Sylvie Kimche has won two races since I last reported, and Yumi Ogita, Sid Howard, Hank Schiffman, Susan Pearsall and Judith Tripp took home gold medals or the symbolic equivalent.
There are some races outside of Central Park, and we should recognize Stacy Creamer’s actual bronze medal from the World Duathlon Championships in her age group. In the same vein, I finished fourth in the masters division at the National Summer Biathlon Championships in Lake Placid. (There is one more race on the summer biathlon calendar, on November 8 near Hazleton, PA, and I would be happy to help a novice learn the sport.) We should have also blinked as Neil Fitzgerald went by with his 17:01 at the New Haven 5k on September 7. Steve Monte ran a 17:18 on that course somewhere near Yale, and John Affleck turned in an 18:24.
To the original purpose of the column: Five of us ran 52-week PRs over the last few weeks: Budd Heyman, Robert Mauriello, Robert Siegel, Phillip Vasquez, and Takeshi Yamazaki.
Despite the orange fireworks, the club standings have changed only a little, and not for the better, as the 40+ women slipped to second place. On the other hand, the mighty men’s 50+ team continues to dominate, leading by a score of 117 to 86.
First Place: Women 50+, Men 50+
Second Place: Women 40+, Women 60+
Fourth Place: Men 40+
Eighth Place: Men 60+
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