Summer 2007

-- Well, the summer is over and we're back to our normal schedule. --

We have three new events this summer: 1) The CR Summer Grand Prix, 2) the Wednesday Summer Series and 3) Lake Winnepasaukee Relay teams sponsored by CR. If you have any question or suggestion, please email events@communityrunning.org.

The First Ever CR Summer Grand Prix

CR coaches have selected 9 races over the summer. We encourage members to enter all these races. Your performance at them will be closely tracked by Hillary, the self-appointed Grand Prix Master, and members with the highest combined scores (scoring explained below) on their top 5 races will be recognized/given accolades at the Fall Banquet/General Assembly, as will those who ran all 9 races, and possibly a couple of other awards decided by the coaches (best sob story to tug at Brian's heart strings, etc.). This will be a fun, friendly, healthy competition for all of us!

Scoring: For each race that a member runs, his/her time will be translated into an scale using an age-graded system. Check out this page to find out more. Then the top 10 finishers according to the age-gender adjusted results will be awarded points for their performance. 15 points for the top finisher, 14 points for the second place finisher,..., 6 points for the 10th place finisher. Any other runner who completes the race gets 5 points. (This way running the race is better than staying in bed --points-wise, that is). At the end of the summer, the top 5 point values for each runner will be combined into that runner's Grand Prix total.

The Races: Our wonderful coaches have selected a wide variety of races. Only your top 5 performances will count toward your overall score, so no big deal if you have to miss a race or two. You can still participate in the Grand Prix.

Here's the schedule:

Week Ending:

5/26 1 Mile USATF Developmental @ MIT (Wed 5/23)
6/02
6/09
6/16 3.1 Mile Milton 5k (Tue 6/12)
6/23 7.5 Mile Charles River Run (Sun 6/24)
6/30
7/7 4.6 Miles Hingham 4th of July (Wed 7/4)
7/14
7/21 5 Miles Bill Luti NH (Sat 7/21)
7/28
8/4 10 Miles Newburyport Yankee (Tue 7/31)
8/11 1 Mile 4x1 Relay (Thur 8/9)
8/18
8/25 2.5 Mile Lynn Woods Relay (Wed 8/22)
9/1
9/8 15.5 Mile Cape Ann (Mon 9/3)

So sign up for those races now! We'll be talking about these races at practices throughout the summer.

The First Ever CR Wednesday Summer Series

Beginning on June 6 , we will substitute our Wednesday track workouts with the Wednesday Summer Series. Every Wednesday, we will meet at the river at a fixed location, such as the MIT sailing center. From there, we will all run the Museum of Science/ Mass Ave bridge loop (a little less than 4 miles) beginning at 7 p.m., and our performances will be timed. The times will be recorded and, at the end of the summer, we'll say marvelously nice things about those people who registered the fastest male and female times, as well as those runners who showed the most improvement and who attended the most runs in the series. The expectation is that some Wednesdays, people will want to race the distance, but that other times, they will do a more traditional tempo workout or go at conversational pace or even do some fartlek. We will take turns being timers/recorders for the series. Keith ( a.k.a. Dumbledore, "three fitness points to Gryffindor!!") expects to attend most of the runs in the series, so look for the speedy guy with the moustache (and the conical hat).

Back in the day, Wednesday was a "free-pizza-with-pitcher-purchase" deal night at Crossroads pub. We plan to extend the Wednesday run to include this important carbo-loading/baseball watching aspect whenever possible. We keep our priorities straight.

CR Relay Teams

We will be supporting teams for the Winnepasaukee Relay on Sept. 22. The club will be covering registration costs for 2 teams ($360) made up of CR members. If we end up having enough interest for more teams, we will spread the CR donation across all teams to defray costs, and runners will be responsible for the remainder. In addition, we will build one team from those interested to be our "highest-probability-of winning-something" team. The coaches will have final say on the membership of that team.

As a CR supported event, we hope that runners will wear the nice shirts that we ordered this year (available to club members at the subsidized rate of $15 each for members! such a deal!) while racing.

We'll assemble teams by the end of July so we can get our registration in before the rates go up. Please email hillary@communityrunning.org if you're interested in being part of a team.