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Send comments to webmaster@centralparktc.org. Does the Word "Duh" Mean Anything To You? This just in from the paper of record: it's hard to peak in all three triathlon sports at once. In fact, adding two new sports to your regimen can even hurt your strength in your primary sport. Who knew?
Another AG Ranking* from Joe Bolster Coach Devon sends the following:
Joe Bolster has done it again! We appreciate all his hard work and the athletes for running so fast! 2008 Indoor CPTC Age-Grade Lists Top Twenty Open Women
Top Twenty Open Men
Top Masters Women
Top Masters Men
*Note: The last number in the Open athletes, and next-to-last in the Masters, is the age-grade percentage. The last figure in the Masters stats is the age-graded equivalent time. We hope to reformat these better in the near future, but wanted to get the numbers up right away.
Aileen Conlon in 10,000 meter race live on the internet For those of you who are interested in live world-class distance track races, the Payton Jordan Invitational in Stanford, California is showing live on flotrack.com as of 9:30 PM Sunday night. There will be some top races and a possible American Record attempt in the women’s 10,000. If you can manage to keep awake, you can see Aileen Conlon in the second heat of the women’s 10,000 which starts at 1:08 AM eastern time Monday morning.
Videos of races with CPTC runners Several videos of elite races with club members are available for your viewing pleasure on Flotrack.com. You can see Aileen Conlon’s PR and club record 10,000 meter race in Stanford, (in the race where Lisa Koll ran the leading American time of the year) here.
Flotrack.com also showed the Penn Relays Olympic Development distance races live last Thursday night, and the full videos are still available. It was very exciting to see Aileen take the lead in the 5000 meters, where she set another club record, which you can see here. You can check out John Roberts (who set a PR and broke 15 minutes for the first time) and Carl Dambkowski in the men’s 5000 here, and finally Sara Vergote and Lauren Gustafson in the women’s 10,000 meters here. UES Apartment Available $3550 / 1br - UES- 80th St- 1BR Penthouse w/ 26X8 PRIVATE Terrace - Avail 5/16
See Craig's List ad here! NO FEE! This is for a SUBLET or LEASE TAKEOVER from the existing tenant with an option to sign a lease extension! 80th St bw 1st & York Ave; Large PENTHOUSE 1 BR (825 sq ft) with HUGE PRIVATE 26 X 8 ft TERRACE overlooking the city! It was completely renovated in Nov 2007 with a new Granite Kitchen and GE appliances and a newly renovated Bathroom. This PET FRIENDLY Building comes with: -24 Hour Doorman -Elevators -Laundry Room -Garage (add'l charge); $3550 to take over my lease which goes through 11/30/08 with an option to sign a new 12 month lease with the Mgmt Co after sublet is over; I am looking to get out of my lease so help me help you! Available May 16. Please contact Michael Basen at mikeb0724 at earthlink.net if interested. Stacy Wins Duathlon AP; Bound for Rimini Stacy Creamer won her age place (45-49) in the National Duathlon Championships in Richmond on Sunday. Officially she was the 135th finisher overall, but close reading indicates she was the 18th female.
The fun doesn't stop with the age-place win. Stacy gets to go to Rimini, Italy for the World Duathlon Championships in September. Rimini is already familiar to many club masters, since year's World Masters Championships were held in its suburb, the sunny, louche and bicycle-friendly town of Riccione (home to world-famous Oltramere waterpark and Ulisse the happy dolphin). Results Are Up There have been so many extraordinary race results in the last few weeks--on the road, and on track at Princeton, Yale, Penn, Icahn and elsewhere--it sometimes seems supererogatory even to mention them. 15-minute (or sub) men's 5Ks! 17-minute (or sub) women's 5Ks! New club records in the 10k and relays!
Check out the Racing page. Results really are being posted on a more-or-less timely basis, though the volume and quality can be overwhelming. Note From The President To all Members:
Central Park Track Club will be holding its annual election of officers and directors in June 2008. Please let me know if you are interested in standing for election as either an officer or a director, or both, of the Club. We currently have 13 directors and, although the board has not officially set the number of directors for the coming year, we expect to have the same or a similar number of directors next year. The officers of the Club that will be elected are the President, a Vice President, a Secretary and a Treasurer. Individuals may submit their names as candidates for a particular officer position, a director position or a particular officer position and a director position. The names of the candidates will be distributed to all members in good standing in May and the election will be held in June. We encourage you to get more involved in the Club by submitting your name as a candidate for office. Please email me at aruben at montran.com or call me at 212-519-1372 if you have any questions or need further information. The deadline for submitting your name for consideration is May 5th, 2008. Very truly yours, Alan Ruben One in a Hundred Congratulations to Laura Ford on being named one of The New York Observer's Brooklyn Literary 100 (she's under Clinton Hill, a neighborhood that even you Manhattanites must be familiar with by now).
New Uniforms a-Comin' . . . Pay Dues Online! New team uniforms (singlet and shorts) are arriving in two weeks and will be complementary (courtesy of Nike) to all CPTC members who have paid their 2008 dues.
NEED TO PAY 2008 DUES? You can now pay online: http://www.centralparktc.org/dues/ OR send Check payable to Central Park Track Club c/o Jonathan Calvey 106 Colony Road Darien, CT 06820 2008 DUES LEVELS Order of the Orange $500+ Sponsor $250+ Contributor $175+ Basic Membership Dues $125 Student, Hardship, Out-of-town, Inactive $50 NEW MEMBER? If you've enjoyed our workouts and want to join the club, please send in the application with your dues check. March Madness Brings April Gladness Well, for most people it brings sadness, since there can be only one winner in each March Madness pool. But for Josh Feldman it brings the thrill of victory, as he captures his second consecutive CPTC March Madness pool victory. Also enjoying a win today is Joshua Rayman, who wins for best name with Sir Ephalot, because it made us laugh (yes, we're twelve years old). But happiest of all is yours truly, as we no longer have to work around the journal update tool to paste these score tables in. If we'd known how often we were going to run these pools, we'd have built the tool better, but hopefully we'll have the new journal page running by the time of the next tournament pool (Euro 2008, if we can find a good host). Final results below.
Must The Games Go On? The foolish debate about whether politics and the Olympics should mix continues. (As we noted before, politics have always mixed with the Olympics and always will. The debate is really about what sort of politics should be allowed to mix with the Five Ring Circus.) Buzz Bissinger raises a more interesting question in an op-ed in today's Times: should the Olympics even continue at all? His answer is pretty clear:
There is only one way left to improve the Olympics: to permanently end them.
A little harsh, but he's got a point. The Olympics somehow become more bloated each year. Would-be hosts engage in bribery and court bankruptcy before tearing up their cities to build facilities that often have no use once the games are over. The huge television deals and corporate sponsorships annoy the purists who bemoan the loss of the "spirit of the games," which would be fine except for the fact that only a small fraction of that money trickles down to the athletes. (And it's not like anyone is happy with the TV coverage we get.)
Speaking of those athletes, what about them? "This is their chance to march into the Olympic stadium," says Bob Costas, who will have his seventh turn as the prime-time Olympics host for NBC in Beijing. "It is the culmination of all their time and effort. Many of them come out of impoverished circumstances and they are exposed to more in two weeks than they might be in two years."
This already exists in some sports. The top soccer players skip the Olympics, but they show up for the World Cup, as well as the European Cup and other regional tournaments. The World Baseball Classic proved more popular than any Olympic baseball tournaments. The grand slam events are more prestigious than Olympic tennis. And golf has survived just fine in the century since it was booted out of the games.
It is the single best argument for the Olympics. But still not enough to overcome the sordid history. ... In place of the Olympics, world championships would still be held in individual sports as they are now, but perhaps at permanent venues designed for optimum performance. This would be a good thing for athletes. For all the hype, the Games often don't provide the greatest performances. None of that means it's time to scrap the games just yet — though trimming them down wouldn't be a bad idea — but even if Bissinger's cure seems excessive now, it's hard to argue with his diagnosis. Every Olympics brings new concerns and new suggestions for how to fix the games. But some things turn out to be beyond repair. Clearance Sale on Orange Nike Gear Urban Athletics is having a FINAL CLEARANCE SALE on Orange Nike gear....
Huge Discounts! 70% off retail on the these items..... WOMEN Cool orange short-sleeve now $14 White long-sleeve with orange panels now $16 Orange half-zip long-sleeve now $19 MEN CPTC Burnt Orange Short-Sleeve now $15 Burnt Orange Long-Sleeve now $16 And don't forget the burnt orange CPTC Jackets for only $55 URBAN ATHLETICS 1291 Madison Ave (Southeast corner of 92nd Street) 212-828-1906 Post-Race at Gin Mill Sunday; Burnt-Orange Discounts Timely announcements from all over:
Sunday April 13th at 9am in Central Park is the Thomas Lebrecque 4-Miler, the second NYRR scoring race of 2008. PRE-RACE: Meet at the Daniel Webster Statue at 8am for a team warm-up.
Sound familiar? There was another Gin Mill beano scheduled seven weeks ago, to follow the Snowflake 4-Miler, the first big "points" race of the year . . . which got canceled . . . or, to be more precise, downgraded into an unscored Fun Run. No blizzards or ice storms are on the weather map this weekend.
POST-RACE: Gathering at The Gin Mill (Amsterdam Avenue between 81st and 82nd) at 2pm. From Coach Devon comes word that Urban Athletics (uptown, 1291 Madison) still has orange Nike CPTC gear available, much of it handsomely discounted. Clearance sale! New CPTC Race Calendar You can now view all the upcoming races!
Thanks to google calendar you can -subscribe to CPTC race calendar (use the button at the bottom of the calendar) -it will be kept up to date -works with outlook and any calendar program that can use iCal (.ics) Unfortunately with such a large and awesome team, we can't list every single race that every single CPTC member runs in. We will list the races where we have a number of people racing. NEW CPTC RACE CALENDAR What We Saw at the Masters (Worlds) We congratulate all the athletes
So declares the English-language page at www.clermont2008.com, website for this year's World Masters, March 17-22 in Clermont-Ferrand, France.
who have been competiting to the 3rd WMA Athletics World Championships Indoor Masters! Likewise, we're sure!  Clermont-Ferrand is famous for three things: Michelin tires (a local museum has mounted an in-depth advertising retrospective on Bibendum, the Tire Man); The Sorrow and the Pity; and of course the First Crusade, which Pope Urban II preached in the year 1095. Oh wait--make that four things. They have a volcano, Puy-de-Dome, which hovers over the landscape like Mt. Rainier in Seattle. The tourist board puts a stylized picture of it on their promotional literature. Note that you can't actually see the volcano from most of the town. It's only when you've trudged back down to the train station on Avenue de l'Union Sovietique for the trip back to Paris that you finally look up and realize what what that blobby little blue-and-white icon was supposed to represent.
Clermont-Ferrand is four hours from Paris, high up in the Massif Centrale. There were rainstorms and/or snowstorms every day of the meet. On the plus side, the town has a nice old medieval center with a shopping mall and an equestrian statue of Vercingetorix. Even nicer, a spiffy red tramway (free to WMA athletes) that speeds you to the meet in fifteen minutes. So here we are at Stadium Jean-Pellez, an impressive pile of retro-futurism and aeronautical motifs. The meter-wide ventilation ducts look like jet-engine nacelles. The gold-and-grey banked Mondo track is nice, too, though some people complained it was too hard (concrete underneath) and too steep. Even Lane 1 wasn't flat anywhere. People kept saying they nearly ran off into the infield. No eateries anywhere near the stadium, and it was a quarter-mile walk in the rain to the tram. But no matter. They had a nice canteen where you could buy a can of beer or a sandwich for one-euro-fifty. Sandwiches were half-baguettes with a tiny slice of "fowl" meat or hard sausage. But hey--can't argue with 1.50! Meet organizers devised a clever system to get around the language barrier. You'd give your coinage to some old folks at a table, and they'd hand you a slip of paper (Boisson 1.50) which you'd take over to the counter. You could survive for days on this stuff, along with the odd banana or yoghurt from Monoprix. They had races, too. Big CPTC stars in the first few days were Lisa Daley (F35 division) and Val Barnwell (M50), both easily winning their 200m qualifying races and going on to medal in the finals (gold, Val; silver, Lisa). Lisa then took a gold in the 400. Val gave good theater at the 60m finals on March 18. The gun went off for the "false start" and Val was halfway down the piste even before the officials called it. OK, now the gun goes off again for the real thing. Seven seconds later, Val wins easily. He drops to the floor, curls up, rolls around for a few moments. Great concern all around. Is he hurt? No, just trying to contain his happiness.  Stuart Calderwood barely qualified for the M50 division--opening day was his birthday! In the 3000m he came in 4th (9:36) in a tight and fast finals heat. Two days later he placed sixth in his age group (1:17) in the four-loop half-marathon. Salih Talib took a 5th (60) in the 3k, right between qualifiers and finals for both the 800 and 1500. Busy week! On his trip back through Paris, some luggage fell on Salih's leg. Serious damage. Salih bandaged it up and tried out another 3k in Boston a week later, but dropped out after a few laps.
Karl Hawke took a silver in the M40 division high-jump. Sometime CPTCer Marie-Louise Michelsohn, currently Unattached, took golds in the 800 and 400 (F65). Mary Rosado (F55) arrived sick with flu, but bravely stuck through an 800. Mary had to be at WMA; she's one of the USA team managers. Margot Sheehan was last-seeded for the 3k (F45), but passed a few competitors and knocked some seconds off her PR. What We Saw at the Masters (Nats) Last year CPTC masters took fifth place (out of 80+ clubs) at the USATF Indoor Masters Championships. This year CPTC took fifth again, but there the resemblance ends. Bigger turnout, tougher competition, a lot more points (163 vs. 139 last year)...and a veritable cascade of medals. 25 at last count--almost half of them gold.
Photos are here at the prettysporty.com site: many shots of the 3k, mile, 800 and just about everything else. (Trivia: the protographer behind prettysporty.com is Shalane Flanagan's mother, Cheryl Treworgy, who was herself a ranking xc and distance star named Cheryl Bridges a few decades back.) Detailed results here. See how we are called "Nike Central." Beaverton take note! This is a great improvement over 2006, when the printed program put all our entrants down as the Prospect Park Track Club. When the meet opened on March 28th at Boston's Reggie Lewis Center, it was a cold, sleety-grey Friday outside. Indoors it was warm and getting very orange as the afternoon wore on. The big deal today was the 3000m: Resie Caffrey and Margot Sheehan in the women's; Neil Fitzgerald, Michael Trunkes, Stuart Calderwood, Alan Ruben, Doug Labar and Salih Talib in the men's. The men's 50-54 division alone had 18 entrants, and it took two hours to get through all the 3k heats. On Saturday came the mile (Resie, Margot; Neil, Doug, Dave Bosch, Mike Trunkes) and the 400m (Lisa Daley, Andrea Ostrowski; Neil, Gladstone Jones, Darnell Gatling, Andrew Hogue) and the finals for the 60m dash (Lisa Daley, Randy Frey and our own sprint coach, Shaun Dietz). Meantime Andrew Hogue, Rick Schultz, Karl Hawke picked up some rare and valuable field-event points in the shot put, long jump, high jump. At noon the crowd stood up, put hands on hearts, and remembered the late athlete/vocalist Louise Clark, while Nolan Shaheed of SoCal Track did a mean trumpet riff on that old Billy Graham crowd-pleaser, "How Great Thou Art." A few minutes later, Nolan took his usual gold in the M55 mile. Sunday...still cold, but blindingly sunny. Heats were fast and furious. 800s in the morning (Resie, Margot; Neil, Chris Potter, Dave, Doug, Anthony Baker, Hal Lieberman), 200s after noon (Lisa, Andrea; Gladstone, Randy). This was, alas, the final Indoor Masters at the Reggie Lewis Center, at least for a while. It's been there every year since 2002, apart from a strange 2005 season when they sent it to Boise, Idaho and nobody showed up. (Not entirely true, but that's the story you hear.) Next March the meet goes to Landover, Maryland, where they have a flat indoor track that they promise will soon be Mondoized. The Reggie will be sorely missed. People who compete on the blue-and-buff, ever-so-slightly-banked track often come away saying it's their all-time favorite. Possibly not quite as fast as the Armory's, but easier on the ankles and with a nice firm return. And Reggie is so easy and pleasant to get to, right across from the Roxbury Crossing "T" station. In Boston they call that neighborhood a slum, but to case-hardened Armory trackies it looks like Darien. Stop the Madness! March is over, so we assume that means March Madness is done as well (we've been a little distracted by the start of a sport we actually care about). So today we decided to check on how everyone in the CPTC March Madness pool is doing, and were shocked to discover that there are still two rounds to go. In fact, the tournament won't end until Monday, a full week after the end of March.
For those who can't read the chart below, Josh Feldman is still in first, followed closely by The Prez and Caryn Gehrke, who jumped from third to first in the last two rounds. Simple math shows that J-Fed, Armando and Noah have no chance of winning, and a more in-depth analysis of everyone's picks would probably show that some or all of the middle four teams are just as doomed. Normally we would undertake that analysis for you, but we still have a lot of season three of Battlestar Galactica to get through so we can start watching the new episodes.
Invite for Masters Runners Michael Potter sends out this invitation for a master's mile at White Planis High School on May 8.
I am extremely happy and proud to announce that my alma mater, White Plains High School, is sending an open invitation to all Masters runners (30 and above/men and women) to participate in the first-ever Masters Mile at the 41st Edition of the Glenn D. Loucks Memorial Track and Field Meet. This is one of the most prestigious High School meets in the country, with schools participating from Canada all the way down to Florida and as far as west as Colorado. Past winners at the meet include Don Paige, Mark Belger, Alberto Salazar, Jen Rhines, Joetta Clark, etc. My high school coach, Fred Singleton, is the meet director and sent me an email on this last week. Here is the following information: Here is a direct link to the entry procedure: http://www.loucksgames.org/entries/Master's%20Mile%20Entry%20Procedure.html Website: http://www.loucksgames.org/ Race date: Thursday, May 8, 2008 (approximately 6:30 pm) I hope you all can participate. Yours, Michael Louise Clark From Stacy Creamer:
As many of you may know, Louise Clark, a talented local sprinter and fabulous singer, passed away on Easter Sunday after a long battle with cancer. The Armory was near and dear to Louise's heart. She both raced and performed there. I would like to send a donation to the Armory Track & Field Foundation in Louise's memory. I'm inviting others on the team to join me in doing this in hopes of making a more substantial gift. If you would like to contribute, please mail me a check payable to "The Armory Foundation" by May 1. I'll send the checks with a cover letter to Norb Sander saying that Louise's friends on Central Park Track Club want to commemorate her this way. My address is: Stacy Creamer
There is a bit about Louise (including two photos) on the Armory website.
175 West 93rd Street, 8C New York, NY 10025 And here is information about her funeral which will be held this Saturday, March 29: Funeral Arrangements for Louise Clarke
Saturday, March 29, 2008 McCalls Funeral Home Bronxwood Avenue - Between 227th & 228th Street 718-231-7647 Viewing: 10:00 AM Funeral Service: 11:00 AM |
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