Westerly, RI
Tuesday, September 8, 2020
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| Setting up pre-race on the beach. It looks like it's going to be a great night! |
The Charlie Stavros Memorial on the Beach Run is one of my favorite races all year. Why is that?
- Tied with The Blessing of the Fleet, I have a streak of 18 straight years of racing this, and look forward to extending this streak every summer.
- As 1st time runner Keith McAteer described in his Strava post, it's a "cool unique event". How many true on the beach races are there?
- Running barefoot on the beach through the ocean waves is really fun. (I am cognizant that a number of other runners would not concur with me on this point, but it's a blast for me.)
- We are blessed to have a beautiful town beach and pavilion at our disposal for the evening.
- While I never knew Charlie (died in a 1-mile race in Westerly in 1993), I have gotten to know the Stavros family, especially his brother John and sister-in-law Jeanne, and this is a blessing to me as they are very kind people who support the race and truly love to see the runners come out each year.
- This is one of the few races that immediately after finishing, you can jump into the ocean to cool off.
Of course, 2020 is not a normal year with the coronavirus pandemic and it was far from certain that we would even be able to hold the event. As with our limited and reduced Fun Runs and Bottone Mile this summer, we had a number of planning sessions, rewrote Safety Plans to include various COVID safety measures, and came down to the wire just a few days before the event before we got full approvals and secured liability insurance.
Not everything that has come out of the coronavirus pandemic has been bad. What blasphemy, you say? The pandemic and need to minimize touching and exchanging of items has been a positive disruptor for increasing technology adoption at events. This year we had no day of paper registration, as we switched everything to electronic, and did away with the paper index cards handed out at the finish line and turned in sweat covered for us to tabulate. This is a model (no paper registration forms, no cash handling) that we will follow at least for the rest of this year and will consider for future years.
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| An unintended by-product of the pandemic was creating bibs for our beach run. I doubt we will ever go back to index cards and corresponding manual data entry after this. |
As in past years, we selected the date of the Stavros Beach Race in November of the preceding year, and typically select the first weekday after Labor Day that the low tide is approximately 6pm. The town requests to run the event after the beach has closed for the season, which is usually Labor Day. But again, this isn't a normal year, and unbeknownst to us, due to coronavirus the beach was still open this year after Labor Day. What does coronavirus have to do with the beach closing being extended? Because school openings in RI were delayed because of the pandemic and there was a desire to keep safer outdoor spaces open. So we scrambled with the town to look at alternate dates, but with the next low-tide weekday not coming up until late September, the town just asked us to make a few minor changes, mostly with holding our registration and COVID screening at a town lot across the street, and we were allowed to keep our original date.
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| Westerly Sun pic, with my better half |
The race: So, against that long backdrop, here are my observations on the race itself. At 6:00pm sharp, ten of us toed the line for what would be the first of six socially distanced waves. In the first wave, eight were between ages 11 and 26, one in his 40s (Eric Ciocca) and myself. The odds were not stacked well for me in such a short race. Oftentimes in this race, 10-20 high schoolers will throw caution to the wind and fly out ahead of me in a near-sprint. However, with high school teams not yet practicing due to COVID delays, there were but a few high schoolers taking part in this year's race and they were the more serious ones that had run our summer events and seemed better disciplined at pacing.
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| 1st wave, officially "Wave 0" takes off from their individual socially distanced cones, while the next wave behind them waits to move into same cones and take off 30 seconds later. --- The oldest (and apparently) slowest guy in the wave is in far right. |
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| Wait! Why did you guys all take off on me? |
When the dust, or rather sand, settled, a pretty tight pack of five had formed and led the race out to the turn-around at Weekapaug Breachway. I followed in 6th place, and ran a 5:58 first mile, but never got dropped too far behind, and in fact was surprised that I was at most ten seconds behind at the turn-around.
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| Eric (far back right) and me (back left) bringing up the back of the pack of this wave. It looks like only 1 of the 10 of us is wearing shoes. Fortunately for him, the penalty tonight won't be too great running up and around breaking waves as the surf is very calm. |
While I've never been an OAB fan, after the cone turnaround, it is kind of fun to see the runners coming at you and in a perverse way knowing they have further to run at this point. With COVID staggered starts, they were spread out more than usual, and never got in my way. I ran right at the water's edge and other than maybe one place near Seaside, the sand was pretty hard and easy to run on.
With about a mile to go, I surprisingly caught up to the lead pack, despite my 2nd mile having slowed to a 6:13. In fact, Keith's second mile was a pedestrian 6:21, so I asked "What are you guys doing? Walking out here?". While the initial response is not printable, Keith later told me he was looking for the slowest time he could win in. Well, I wasn't letting him getting off that easy, so I picked up the pace ever slow slightly. Tanner dropped off hard, and the others (Keith, Dave Goodrich, Alex Olendorf, Nick C) all stayed together with me. This was going to be an ugly finish, as I'm now running against a group where each is half my age, and the old man doesn't have a kick.
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We're seeing some separation in the pack of 6 of us now:
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I'm guessing that with less than 1/2 mile to go, Jake Serra, who had been running negative splits, put an end to this nonsense. He came out of nowhere and passed Keith, which spurred Keith to retake the lead. Alex and I chased after, while Dave and Nick dropped back a bit. I sprinted with all I had, and ended up 1 second behind Jake in 3rd place, just nudging Alex into 4th also by 1 second.
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| Keith leaves nothing to chance, and finally is really pulling away now |
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| I'm trying to stay relevant as battling for 3rd and 4th place |
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Just edging into 3rd before the finish. Questions:
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Final results: 18:16 (average pace 6:05), 3rd out of 56 finishers. Full results here.
Caught my breath a little before shedding my singlet and jumping into the refreshing ocean. Touched based with my Mom, who had come to watch two of her sons, a daughter-in-law and a granddaughter race, talked with a few others, cooled down with Keith and came back to help the awesome WTAC volunteer crew break down the race setup and clean up. Even with the COVID restrictions, it was a great night, and made all worthwhile by those that came up to me and/or e-mailed me post-race to thank me and the WTAC for hosting the event.
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| Post-race and post-dip catch-up with family: my Mom in white shirt behind me, my niece Ellie in in pink life preserver (her older sister ran in race), my brother Kurt in blue |
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| And the sun sets (literally and figuratively) on another great Stavros Beach Run. Truly one of my favorite evenings the entire year. |
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| Post-race outdoor dinner on the patio at Pizza Place, before returning home to post results. Nice finish to the evening. |
Hahahah I'm only just finding this, I believe I told you to
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