Mendon Trail Run - 2016-11-05
We had nearly perfect weather on November 5th for the Mendon Trail Run. The colors
in the park were beautiful and the trails were in great condition. The 102 starters
in the 50k event headed out at 8am. The remainder of the runners: 37 for 30k, 75 for
20k and 99 for 10k, started at 9:30. It was an impressive group of runners and we
saw the leader and eventual winner of the 50k, Jason Mintz, come through after his
first 10k loop at approximately 45 minutes. He stayed pretty close to that pace for
the rest of the run to finish with a total time of 4 hours and 3 seconds. The female
overall winner of the 50k was Ellie Pell with a time of 4:16:51. We believe that is
the record time for women in the 50k and beats the previous best time by over 20 minutes.
Other distance winners were Matthew Lovell (2:19:19) and Jill Skivington (2:37:53) for
the 30k, Travis Money (1:34:32) and Annie Preston (1:46:45) for the 20k and Michael
Gardella (42:14) and Molly Romano (52:59) for the 10k. All together 286 runners completed
the courses. We had 6 ROC members out running: Doug Hall, David Vickers, Maria Huber,
Carl Palmer and Rukhsana Cofer on the 10k course and Joseph Shayka on the 20k course.
As registrar, Dick Detwiler compiled stats on where our runners came from. While 60% were
from the greater Rochester area, the other 40% came from a wide range of places including:
Canada (Quebec, Toronto, St. Catharines, Burlington, and Pt. Perry), Pennsylvania, Maryland,
Maine, Michigan, New Jersey and about 110 runners from across New York. We received many
compliments throughout the day about all aspects of the run and many runners said this is
one of their favorite races.
We had a huge team of ROC members (and some non-members!) volunteering: Dick Detwiler,
Anne Schwartz, Rick Worner, Linda Kohn, Don Winslow, Laura Howard, Doug Hall, Gary Maslanka,
Nancy Burgey, Bob Bundy, Greg Michels, Lindsay Worner, Mike Meynadasy, Paul Schwartz,
Kameron Schwartz, Natalie Johnstone, Mike and Jackie Alexander, Jim Morange, Cheryl Detwiler,
Patty Borden, Tyler Borden, and Rob Stevens. I really appreciate all the hard work everyone
put in to make the event a success.
Many thanks to Medved for their sponsorship of gift certificates for awards for overall winners
in each race and age group winners in the 50k. We also appreciated the endurance fuel mix
contributed by Tailwind.
Heidi Hall, meet director