Price Was Right On at Strides for Life Three-Miler

A 22-year-old squash and tennis player when he was at Dartmouth, Malachi Price, who can run pretty well, won Sunday’s Strides for Life 3-mile race in Southampton. Tara Farrell, 38, who won this race outright the better part of a decade ago, was the women’s winner — and third over all — in 18 minutes and 43 seconds.

Price’s winning time was 17:31. The race, in its 12th year, and noteworthy for the sheer fact that in that time more than $4.5 million has been earmarked for lung cancer research, was, as usual, a big draw. There were 498 finishers, most of whom ran, some of whom walked with dogs or with babies in strollers.

Nancy Sanford, the Lung Cancer Research Foundation’s executive director, said that “our teams [there were 18 this year] raise most of the money — more than $350,000 this year.” There are corporate and wealthy individual donors as well.

Speaking from a podium at the starting line, Sanford said that plans were in the works to have 32 similar races throughout the country. Lung cancer is said to be the number-one cancer killer worldwide. According to the foundation, lung cancer causes more deaths in the United States than breast cancer, pancreatic cancer, and prostate cancer combined.

Price, whose 20-year-old sister, Camille, is on the squash team at Princeton, said, when questioned, that he had majored in Russian area studies with a modification in economics in college, and was, he was happy to say, recently hired by the Boston Consulting Group. He and his sister, who finished 23rd, in 22:15, were members of Team Hope, an alliance of several teams that had competed at Strides for Life before.

A 16-year-old, Audrey Wisch, a junior cross-country and track runner (the 1,500) at Riverdale Country School in the Bronx, was the runner-up to Farrell. 

Asked what they’d been talking about at the starting line, Wisch said she’d asked her what her pace should be.

Later, in a separate conversation, Farrell was asked what she’d told her. “I told her 6:14. Actually, it was,” she said, looking down at her watch, “6:18.”

Wisch was sixth over all, in 19:54. She ran the first mile, she said, in 6:06, but slowed down a bit after that. Farrell, she said, had led the whole way. Joe Brereton, 34, of New York City, was the runner-up to Price, in 17:41.

Farrell has been on a roll lately in local races, having won Jordan’s Run two weeks ago, and one on “the exact same course” the week before. It was cooler that day and rainy; thus her time was, she said, a bit faster — 18:25.

A former Gubbins Running Ahead employee who now works in the Southampton Town clerk’s office, Farrell said Gubbins would be well represented at Ellen’s Run on Sunday, a race whose start-finish line is adjacent to Southampton Hospital’s Parrish Hall.

Price said he too might be in Ellen’s Run.

Farrell, who lives in East Quogue, said she leaves there for Southampton at around 5:30 a.m., and runs, often on Meadow Lane, before work. Following the race, she was seen walking down a side street with her 8-year-old son, Seth. 

Asked if he ran, Farrell said, with a smile, “He does. He was second in his age group at Jordan’s Run.”