Eastern New England Trail Race Series

The inaugural Eastern New England Trail Race Series has completed nine trail events. Long standing events as well as newer ones have provided a Whitman Sampler of trail races. If you have been participating in some of the races you will notice the differences between each location. This first year will give runners an opportunity to sample different distances and degrees of difficulty. In the future this will come in handy when selecting a personal running schedule.

As is common with most first attempts the series has had its ups and downs. Looking over the standings I would say the number of participants is one of those pluses. There are many more individuals who have participated in multiple races than I would have guessed. One of the negatives has been the difficulty in calculating the standings. North Medford Club member George Corff has developed a program for changing results from races into series standings as well as age group standings. As you can imagine, this is a very time consuming chore. George has done a tremendous job with this. What has made it difficult is that some individual race results have been submitted to Coolrunning in upper case. The program does not recognize the already existing name and consequently points are not added to that person's total. If you notice that a race you have participated in has not been credited to your points total please notify me and we will make the correction.

Upcoming races include the very challenging Wapack 17 miler on August 31st. Paul Funch is the race director and does a great job of managing this race. Also, on September 6 the Wrentham 20K will be held, Peter Dubendris race director. If you are looking for something a little shorter let me suggest my club's North Medford Club Overlook 7M and 5K Walk/Run Trail Race. This is the fifth running of this race in the past three years and we are very encouraged by the growing number of runners who return as well as run it for the first time.

Happy Trails to all.