Boston Mayor's Cup

The Mayor’s Cup is a big deal XC race at Boston’s Franklin Park. GVH sent out both a men’s a women’s team to represent the Roc. The men’s team was fast and looking to finish high up; the women’s team was the first one to go in like 3 years… so yeah no expectations there. But hey, a weekend of team bonding and XC – doesn’t get much better than that.

The women were racing a 5k course with one major hill, lots of grass, and multiple laps. Usually this is a pretty fast course and some people even think it’s measured short. There’s also a lot of fast people that show up, so maybe it’s correct and everyone just races so well here. At any rate, it’s impressive that the slowest girls last year were finishing in the 21 minute area, meaning that no one here is all that slow.

It rained cats and dogs the whole way over to Boston the day before, and our checking out the course before dinner that day confirmed that things were indeed a little moist. That meant that things were looking like they’d be more messy than fast this time around, but it’s the mud that makes xc fun, right?

Ok, so we all lined up for the start, and if you check out the video my team is in maroon on the right hand side. Our nemeses, Syracuse Chargers (they’re nice girls, just rivals cause they’re so close), are in green. The gun went off, and it seemed like the faster girls all lined up on the left hand side, cause I was running around in no man’s land for a bit. I followed two Syracuse girls around the first cone, tucked in and hoped I wasn’t going too fast.

Some girls were trying to hop around the puddles, but I was mooshing right through them. I think I had some really awesome spikes, because my traction felt great even though things were slippy in my trainers. So you don’t get to see this part on the video, but when we were around the back side this pore girl stepped on one of those small Frisbee shaped cones and got it stuck on her spikes. She was running kinda like a duck and was trying to shake it off. Then she tried to pull it off while still running. She eventually had to stop, and I don’t think I saw her again after that. Poor girl (I was trying hard not to laugh).

Anyway I came around the mile at 5:30 (fast!) behind the Syracuse girls, and was still feeling good. We looped back around the start line, and you can see this part in the next cut of the video. I’m in like the third big pack that comes around – just look for the floppy hair. We head back out and the next lap goes up the infamous bear cage hill.

Apparently the park used to be one big zoo, so they have all of these old dilapidated cages around. At the top of one hill is the bear cage, which is actually really spooky. Wish I had had some black and white film for it. I pushed it up the hill a bit, and got ahead of the Syracuse girl, only to get passed again at the top. I was still feeling ok, but I was starting to lose touch around here I think. We came back to the start again, and you can see things are getting much more strung out. I was 11 minutes and something at the second mile, and then we headed out to the incredibly wet “wilderness.”

I was really slowing down out here and just half heartedly slopping through the puddles. Luckily it didn’t last long and only had a couple of rollers. It popped us out down into the field, and I might have gotten passed by like 5 girls around here. I was trying to maintain contact, but quickly dying. I remembered the other girls saying that we had to pass at least 1 person going into the chute, and somewhere I got the energy to sprint by 2 (except in the results it looks like I had the exact same time as the second one and lost the tie somehow –oh wells it’s the effort that counts).

So results: I was 23rd overall with 18:36, which is not my fastest xc 5k this year but it felt like a good race. I didn’t kill myself in the first mile like I usually do. My team got 7th out of 8 teams, and that’s a start for not having a team in this race in a long time. The winner was 16:39, which is a bit slower than previous years. Oh and the Syracuse girl that beat me in the Festival of Races by a minute was only 10s ahead this time.

There’s like 3 more XC races this season. Weeee!