The Lost Haringa

Race winner Kevin Somers on the left and Max White on the right and the lost Matt Haringa in the middle.
photo by GreaterSnap

Know the course well before you start running sounds like good advice. So an hour before the featured Groton USATF Cross-country Grand Prix circuit race on Sunday several GBTC runners set out to run the 3.4 mile course. There would be plenty of time to jog over the course in an hour and check out the steep hills and tricky footing. The long race would start at 12:30 and the short one at 12:40. After ten minutes most of the team had seen enough of the course. White chalk arrows on the ground and yellow caution tape clearly marked the trails. No one would get lost. They turned and set back.

But Matt Haringa, Cynthia Hastings, and I continued. We wanted to see the entire course. We looked for but never saw the turnoff for the long course. But when after forty minutes we had not returned to the start, we sensed something was wrong. A bearded old man sitting like a forest gnome at a water table far from anywhere told us that the white arrows marked the short course. We continued in a rush with Matt running ahead trying to get to the start on time. But 12:30 and then 12:40 passed with us still obediently following the white arrows like Alice following the white rabbit to wonderland.

The white arrows marked only the longer 9.4 mile course. Blue arrows marked the short course. We had never seen any blue arrows because a strand of the yellow caution tape 400 meters from the start blocked the turn to the blue arrows. The race directors planed to remove that tape after the long race started. From the start we had all been on the long course!

Matt emerged from his tour in time to see teammate Kevin Somers scampering to victory and a course record. Shortly thereafter GBTC's Megan Lynch flew in over the astoundingly steep, precipitous, rooty, rocky, trails ahead of SISU's Caitlyn Clark to win the women's race and set a new course record.

GBTC had no women's team. The scores had not been posted when we left. Cynthia and I crossed the finish line in last place. We had been running for an hour and forty-eight minutes. The GBTC order of finish follows:

Kevin Somers
Junyong Pak
Scott Bosworth
Joel Bargmann
Russ Miller
Team scores will go up on the USATF XC Site.
Full results are here.