Nike Central Park Track Club

Conventional wisdom is that masters athletes take longer to recover than younger runners. Some coaches – heck, one of our coaches – say that it takes an athlete of any age one day to recover per mile raced. Being unconventional has a payoff sometimes, and Stuart Calderwood is attestation.  He ran the Philadelphia Marathon on [...]

Remember how Joan Benoit won the 1984 Olympic Marathon by over a minute? This isn’t like that at all. Three team championships are so close this year that they will be decided in the last points race of the year this weekend. 
Two of the contests are within two points and the other is just 11 [...]

I called teammate John De Csepel to get some details on his ever-accelerating fall season. Sunday at the four-miler, John ran 24:53, for an age-graded score of 73.8%, and was fourth CPTCer on the team of any age. But more to the point for Faster Masters, he has the distinction of having the longest streak [...]

Good news for website readers: my fingers are the only part of my body that is not sore.
The best news from the 2008 marathon is on the team side – after winning absolutely zero team titles in 2007, two of our masters teams pushed through the headwind for big wins on Sunday.
Jill Vollweiler and the [...]

Yumi Ogita has painted the park orange this fall. Since the team championships in August, Yumi has knocked out a streak of three consecutive faster races, all in the mid 80% range. At the Marathon Kickoff today, she ran a 52-week age-graded percentage PR, with a very strong 84.6% (31:31). She was the fastest CPTC [...]

The Staten Island Half was the third half-marathon put on by the NYRRC in about a month, plus an 18-miler thrown in as a lure for long distance mavens Steven Monte and Michael Rennock. Perhaps as a result of the abundance of long races, only six CPTC masters braved an early Sunday morning ferry to [...]

Welcome to masters running Jill Vollweiler.  Jill won the Nike world race thing in August, ran a flying 5:08 mile in September, and now in October at Grete’s ran 1:19 to finish second overall, first in her age group and first among CPTCers, while notching our highest age-graded score of the day (86.9%). Allez, Jill. Now, what [...]

CPTC masters won three medals in the Marathon Tune-Up on Sunday. Unfortunately, I can’t rank the performances statistically by age-graded percentages because the NYRRC doesn’t include such stats for the oddball 18-mile distance. So instead I’ll rank performances by the seat of my pants. Interestingly, masters had the five fastest CPTC times today - I can’t [...]

Jamaica may have Usain Bolt, but we have Rae Baymiller. Rae ran a 6:09 mile Sunday, which, had it been run on a track, would have been a world record, according to www.world-masters-athletics.org. And it would have broken the old mark by seven seconds. Her age-graded score reflected the uncharted territory of her run: 100.1%.
On [...]

What is it about the Queens half marathon that inspires CPTC masters to stay home in huge competitive packs? Just five of the men’s masters team showed up, and zero of the women’s. Which is about the same as last year. The low turnout combined with the approximate temperature and environment of the Titanic’s boiler [...]