Weekend action: Warm "New England" Champs qualifying meets, plus a race-like production in Gotham

Even high-school racing isn't immune to the narcissism of twentysomethings

The boys’ and girls’ races at the New Hampshire Meet of Champions on Saturday shared one depressing element in common: The absence of the odds-on individual favorite owing to injury. As some pundits predicted, Aidan Cox didn’t suit up for Coe-Brown as a precautionary measure, but unbeknownst to those same sources, Bow’s Susanna Zahn was also a late withdrawal, with a lingering foot issue evidently to blame.

Other than that, the two races could scarcely have been more different up front. If you’re unaware of the outcomes and interested in watching videos of the races in a blessedly agnostic state, the girls’ contest is here and the boys’ is here. (At the 17:00 mark of the girls’ race video, you can watch a runner in about 55th place just beyond the two-mile mark take a break, give a handy trailer a few tepid whacks (or hwacks) in frustration or perhaps to awaken someone inside the trailer, and grudgingly rejoin the field after about twenty seconds.)

With Zahn sidelined, Brianna Malone of Portsmouth Christian ran cleanly away from everyone and won by 46 seconds (results). Although no team trophies are awarded at the Meet of Champions, D-II Hanover easily topped the field with 86 points despite none of its girls landing in the top ten overall and only one runner placing in the top twenty.

The boys’ race was, as expected given Cox’s absence, a tight but not lockstep race from start to finish between Lebanon’s Birhanu Harriman and Gilford’s Patrick Gandini. After Gandini established about a 20-meter gap with a half-mile remaining, Harriman made up all of the distance with 40 or 50 meters to go, but Gandini was able to hold him off by less than a quarter of a second, 15:05.2 to 15:05.4. And Coe-Brown, despite having to sit one of the top runners in the nation, triumphed with ease, scoring 70 points to runner-up Souhegan’s 97 (results). That result means that the best two boys’ teams from New Hampshire this fall are Division II teams.

The Alvirne course used for this year’s MoC may be a full 5K, but a few Strava samplings suggest that it’s really between 3.05 miles and the correct 3.107-mile distance. And even if it’s accurate, there’s no way the one-mile and two-mile splits were given at the correct locations. Gandini supposedly went through the mile in 5:04 and two miles in 10:10, but I don’t think he and Harriman accelerated to 4:26 pace after that. Similarly, Malone’s given splits were 5:59 and 12:10, but there’s no way she ran 5:54 (5:20 pace) for the last 1.1 miles. I’m guessing the “mile” was actually close to the 1.7K mark and the “two-mile” actually just beyond 3.3K.

Warm temperatures kept the field’s times slow in relation to the Battle of the Border on the same course, whatever its distance, in early October, when Cox ran 14:32. The top six boys’ and girls’ teams advanced to the New Englands next Saturday.

Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Vermont also had New England Championships qualifying meets over the weekend (results at links). Maine doesn’t have a meet of champions or the like, with its New Englands qualifiers drawn from the three divisional state meets it held on October 29. Massachusetts won’t even have its All-States meet until November 19, a week after the New Englands, and the perennial, needless absence of the Bay State from the potential six-state extravaganza since 1972 (or so) explains why next week’s event in Ponaganset, Rhode Island is really once again a “New England” championship.

The Connecticut State Open Championships were in Wickham Park on Friday, which is where the New Englands were held my senior year (1987) in bitterly cold weather. Glastonbury dominated the girls’ race with 65 points. A reader supplied the photo below of his cousin, who was Glastonbury’s fourth runner, as well as a link to the video highlights of both races.

Wickham Park is a tough, honest course no matter the weather. And Connecticut may be the prettiest flat place in the country in November.

I’ll spend some time during the week cross-referencing results from the Manchester Invitational in New Hampshire, the Thetford Trail Run in Vermont, and a few other 2022 area invitationals to gain a sense of who the favorites will be at the “New Englands” on Saturday. My sense is that other than the Bishop Hendricken boys, Connecticut teams are going to beat up mercilessly on everyone else. Connecticut has almost as many people as the other four represented New England states combined, but this fall the Nutmeg State appears to be dominant even accounting for its numbers advantage.

Also over the weekend, this happened.

MileSplit caught up with Hebert after the race. He had this to say: 

"I just ran it for fun," he said. "I ran it, me and Kevin. I knew me and Kevin from high school." 

"You do know that's not allowed, right?" we responded. "You are a college kid. You can't race in a race, correct?

"I do not race in college anymore," he said. 

What is there to even say about this level of idiocy? Nothing that isn’t self-evident, other than suggesting that Brendan Hebert may have a future with the New York Road Runners.

That club’s annual marathon may have a lot of bodies in it and plenty of monetary backing, but it’s still a joke of a race. The NYRR is a demoralized organization, eager to sponsor and hire cheaters and adopt policies that intentionally degrade the events under its management.

Not only did the NYRR decide, in effect, to offer more prize money to men than to women this year by implementing a prize-money men’s “B” race (the division’s official name is “non-binary,” but no woman will ever win it, and don’t you love this headline?), but it allowed morbidly hyperinflated cruel-fantasy-generator Latoya Snell—last seen unboxing four free pair of HOKA shoes, continuing to claim she’s finished at least 25 marathons, and advising people to chug milk before races—into the field.

I’ll stop posting the same images over and over when Snell stops lying about her accomplishments. She might consider doing this, because the most popular centralized source of information about Latoya Shauntay Snell, per Google, is Beck of the Pack. She gets plenty of fawning from dupes and fellow gaslighters, but it’s distributed fairly evenly across a variety of corrupt platforms.

Snell was unable to heave her untrained bulk along the cruddy streets of Gotham at the 19:00-per-mile pace required to allow an official race finish, and was evidently complaining about this on Instagram, too.

Consider the level of arrogance involved in sitting around filling your face nonstop—and Snell really does regularly engage in “defiance-eating” on-camera, for trolling-for-trolls effect—and then complaining that the most populous metropolitan area in the country refuses to shut down for three or four extra hours so that pretenders like her can spend even more time waddling around in their dismally unprepared states.

Would walkers like Snell—who have daily access to other American roads and paths on which to complete 26-mile strolls at 21 minutes a mile—be willing to pay extra so that the NYRR could keep the city’s streets shut down until sunset? If so, let the free market spea—

Wait, I need to backtrack. Snell didn’t pay anything to get a bib for this marathon. The organizers are so gloriously immoral that they specifically invite obnoxious hometown zeroes like Snell to take part in their demoralized parade and give them freebies to boot.

In other recent NYRR news, despite a stated zero-tolerance doping policy, the organization just selected Nnenna Lynch, who was suspending for doping in 1996, to become the new chairperson of its board of directors in June. While the suspension was for pseudoephedrine and perhaps an honest mistake, zero-tolerance policies concerning doping are set up to account for just such mistakes, as well as “mistakes” and flat-out intentional doping. This is just one more instance of a demoralized organization having no meaningful rules for itself.

Finally, although I don’t think the NYRR was involved in this decision, Chris Chavez, one of the most superficially successful morons in the unremarkable history of organized perambulation, was invited to offer race commentary on the teevee. Such a move is an open concession that the broadcast was aimed specifically at circular-podcast-happy know-nothings whose chief connection to the sport is being told Letsrun.com should be cancelled so that others might shine more brightly.

In its own anodyne defense, the New York City Marathon really has no choice but to be a sick joke. Look where it is. When a city's main media outlet is nothing but a pipeline of propaganda from Wall Street and the Pentagon to chin-masked soccer moms, its politicians are the filthiest, horniest, and most inept on the planet, and its financial markets are rigged to screw over 99.84 percent of the population, the chances of that city hosting a respectable large-scale footrace are almost zero.

I do feel bad for the people who signed up, trained hard, and wound up with a summery, blustery weather day. As much as I detest cowardly and broken orgs “led” by cowardly and broken humans, wishing ill on an entire marathon field or the city itself would be right from the Wokish playbook. And I imagine that the weather explained why the smattering of American elite men on hand either dropped out or posted times reminiscent of Ethiopian women on a runway-style course, and why the U.S. women didn’t fare a lot better.

This may be evident, but I don’t write about New Hampshire running seasons merely because I’m from New Hampshire, or because perhaps 10 percent of this site’s regular readers are based in New England. It’s mainly because New Hampshire is small enough for me to construct semi-complete narratives around without a great deal of work. The idea is to do a compelling enough job so that at least a few people remain interested in some of the main players throughout a given season. And the reason I bother is because I don’t think I run the risk of becoming either bored or fatally cynical when focusing on high-school running, no matter where I look. I can thus maintain a segment of this site mostly isolated from the sport’s depressing realities.

The issues ailing organized running are not minor to me, but the people responsible for covering the sport from the inside are either pleased with the damage because it means clicks (or someone’s cancellation) or have no choice but to pretend running is fairer than it is and its players more pristine than they are because they earn their entire living from covering the sport. I pity the ones who have been around a while and have to pretend against their own sense of ethics that the sport isn’t a doped-up sleaze-scape rife with grifters, whiners, and degenerate pot-stirrers.

The sad thing is that they are fighting over next to nothing, because the world wouldn’t care if marathons stopped handing out cash, period. It might care if high-school cross-country and track lost all momentum, too, but thanks to the essential nature of kids and grumpy old men, that’s in little danger of happening. I think.