Spirits Were Bright Despite the Rain
A young Frenchman from Alsace, Simon Mayeur, won the Run for Rotary 5K, and a young Bonacker, Ryan Fowkes, won the 10K in Amagansett Saturday morning.
Though the runners might have done without the rain, which drizzled initially and poured ultimately, the coolness of the day was to their liking. There were 58 participants in all, pretty much evenly divided between the 3.1 and 6.2-mile counterclockwise loops, which began and ended at Fresh Pond Park.
Fowkes, the top runner on East Hampton High School’s boys cross-country team, and one of his training partners, Eric Perez, a sophomore now at the State University at Oswego, where he runs, treated the 10K as a tempo run. Fowkes’s winning time was 38:03. Perez was the runner-up, in 38:22.
“I did the 5K last year . . . I’m getting in shape for the fall,” Fowkes said. “We’re looking to go to the states.”
Mayeur, a 23-year-old college student majoring in English, won the 5K in 19:24. Sinead FitzGibbon, 47, the women’s winner, was second, in 21:15. Nancy Labiner was the women’s winner — and seventh over all — in the 10K, in 45:09.
Erik Engstrom, who undoubtedly would have been in the van with Fowkes and Perez, was reportedly upstate this past weekend. Kevin Barry (eighth in the 10K, in 45:32), East Hampton’s cross-country coach, said after crossing the line that these three, Jimmy Makrianes, and a couple of others have been running together once a week this summer.
“Potentially, we should be one of the top three Class B teams in the county,” said Barry, who is taking the team to a big cross-country meet in Lakeland, Fla., at the end of September.
Barry and several others from here, including Mike Bahel, Brian Monahan, and Walter Cook, competed in the Lake Placid Ironman triathlon recently. “I packed it in on mile 60 in the bike — I either drank too much lake water . . . there were 2,500 in the swim . . . or didn’t drink enough bottled water and got dehydrated. At any rate, I’d pretty much had it by then.”
Barry said he’d done Lake Placid four times before, so there was nothing to prove. “Mike had a great day. He did it in 11:47 — that’s 11 hours and 47 minutes. Brian did it in 14 hours, and Walter Cook — it was his first one — did it in 15:30.”
“I guess I need a couple of tuneups,” said Joe Brida, 66, after finishing the 5K in 25:51, in 10th place. The U.S.A. Track & Field-Long Island recordholder in the 60-to-64-year-old men’s 1,000-meter indoor race (3:38) and in the 3,000-meter outdoor race (13:37), Brida, who lives in Miller Place, said he’s been coming back from a torn meniscus.
“I’m feeling all right . . . I’m trying to avoid surgery . . . I think I’m going to be okay. What is it they say? ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger?’ It’s a pretty course, nice people, and it’s downhill on the way back. It’s my first time here, but it won’t be the last.”
Brida wasn’t the oldest competitor that day — Harriet Oster, who sported a Barnes Landing Association hat, was. “I’ll be 75 on Aug. 18,” she said. “I’ve been working out at the Y, running there and running back. I’m getting back into it. I’m training myself to run slower.”
Lara DeSanti Siska, one of the Rotarians on hand, said that the races’ proceeds, and those of several other Rotary-sponsored events during the course of the year, feed into the now-50-year-old club’s scholarship fund, as well as into other community efforts such as the East Hampton Food Pantry and the Retreat. Rotary’s high school offshoot, the Interact Club, overseen by Marilyn Marsilio, a guidance counselor, has, she said, about 40 members.
There were three Team Jordan members competing Saturday — Joi Jackson Perle, Arlene Mason, and Vickie Lawrence, who have seen the field at that 5K in Sag Harbor, in memory of the late Marine hero Jordan C. Haerter, grow from 20 in 2016 to more than 400 this year.
“We want it to be even bigger next year,” said Lawrence. “Next year will be the 10th anniversary of his death. Ed Deyermond has told us to prepare for 1,000.”