Shelter Island 10K Went According to Form

Things went according to form Saturday as Edwin Kipsang Rotich, a 28-year-old Kenyan, ran away from his nearest competitor and fellow countryman, Eliud Ngetich, 23, just shy of the 2-mile mark, and cruised thereafter to win the 38th Shelter Island 10K in 29 minutes and 28.57 seconds.

Ngetich won this race in 2015, in 28:53.31, but he was about a minute slower this time. It had been, he said in reply to a question after crossing the finish line at Fiske Field, a bad day for him. “I didn’t have that power — it’s the second time he’s beaten me,” Ngetich said of the winner.

Cliff Clark, one of the founders of this popular race — there were 956 finishers in the 10K and 652 in the 5K — when asked if it had been an upset of sorts, said that Kipsang Rotich had come in with the fastest 10K time among the elite runners, a 27:27.

Clark added that the winner’s splits were 4:25 for the first mile, 8:49 at mile 2, 14:05 at the 5K mark, and 18:17 at the 4-mile mark. He presumed, said Clark, that his splits for the 2, the 5K, and the 4 were course records. That having been said, Kipsang Rotich did not come anywhere near setting a course record for the entire distance. 

“From the second bridge, in other words from four and a half miles to five and three-quarter miles, it’s all uphill,” said Clark. “That’s where this course bites them.”

The St. Mary’s Episcopal Church bell clanged as the large field, led initially by Kipsang Rotich, Ngetich, Bernard Legat, and Eric Chirchir, made a left-hand turn onto St. Mary’s Road. 

Near the Shelter Island Fire Department building, about 100 yards shy of the 2-mile mark, Kipsang Rotich made his move, after which he virtually left Ngetich and the other front-runners in the dust. You could barely make Ngetich out in the distance as Kipsang Rotich swept through the village of Dering Harbor.

As it has in the past number of years, the race was graced by the presence of Joan Benoit Samuelson, the Olympic women’s marathon gold medalist, and by Bill Rodgers, the four-time winner at Boston and New York. Samuelson, who recently turned 60, ran a 39:38.85, which translates into a 6:23-per-mile pace. Clark wondered if it weren’t a world record for her age group, but she reportedly told him she knew it wasn’t. “It might be a U.S. record, though,” Clark said.

Rodgers, who is 69, won the men’s 65-to-69 age division with his 47:33.24. He was 175th over all.

The women’s winner, and 11th over all, was Gotytom Gebreslase, 22, an Ethiopian, who, like the men’s winner, was a Shelter Island first-timer. 

It looked before race time as if it might rain, but aside from mist at the start, in front of the Shelter Island School, it didn’t. It was a bit humid, though, as it often is this time of year, which isn’t conducive to record times.

Among the many spectators was Justin Gubbins, who in 1979 won the inaugural Shelter Island 10K (the women’s winner was Burke Koncelik). 

Gubbins recalled that “a friend of mine, Harold Schwab, who has a running store in Stony Brook and who went to UPenn — he was fourth in the Olympic trials’ intermediate hurdles — said he could beat me in the first half-mile. I must have gone under 2 in those first 800 meters. I crawled the rest of the way.”

“But that wasn’t the first time I raced here. Cliff had an open 2-mile race before that, around 1967, that I won, when I was at Bellport High School.”

Gubbins, who once ran a 1:05 half-marathon, no longer runs. “My knees are shot, but I do the elliptical and ride a stationary bike,” he said.

His wife, Barbara, 57, has not stopped running. Her 42:27.48, good for 68th, topped the 55-to-59-year-old women. 

Another local, Erik Engstrom, 19, just missed the top 20, finishing 23rd, in 35:19.83. That earned him the number-one spot in the 19-and-under group. Eric Perez, a former East Hampton High School teammate of his, placed third in that group, in 39:12.33.

American flags in honor of the late First Lt. Joseph Theinert, a Shelter Islander who was killed in combat in the Middle East in 2010, lined the 10K’s last mile — 6,916 of them by actual count, said Dr. Frank Adipietro, “in memory of all those who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

“Say hi when you pass me by,” Samuelson said during a brief pre-race talk. 

“Our sport is about friends and family,” said Rodgers. “Let’s do our very best in the last mile.”