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Moulton, Camargo cruise to win in Amherst

John Stiffler
Daily Hampshire Gazette
February 26, 2007

AMHERST - Casey Moulton, a senior at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell who runs road races instead of competing on his college's track team, and Claudia Camargo, an Argentinian runner who lives in Danbury, Conn., easily took the winners' prizes at Sunday's 33rd annual D.H. Jones-Town & Country 10-Mile Road Race in Amherst.

On a sunny day with scant wind and mostly good footing despite recent snow on the unpaved portions, Moulton blasted off the starting line by Amherst Regional High School and never glanced back, hammering through the hilly course in 52 minutes, 23 seconds to win by nearly a minute over his closest competition, Jeremy Borling (53:15) of Somerville.

Camargo similarly raced alone, following the few men who were trying to keep in sight of Moulton. She finished 19th overall in 59:34, well ahead of Laura Hayden of Allston (1:04:15 seconds) and Audrey Giesler of Somerville (1:04:54).

Moulton, 25, of Pelham, N.H., has won numerous races in the area in the past two years, but he had never seen the Amherst course before.

"Boy was it hard!" he exclaimed after finishing. "I figured I'd go out fast and try to establish a lead, and I ran sub-5-minute miles at first, but at three and a half miles, after that first uphill (where North East Street turns onto Shutesbury Road), I wanted to quit. It took me two miles to recover from that hill."

He recovered long before anyone behind him did. Maintaining an average pace of 5:15 per mile, Moulton was never challenged.

He also achieved his other main goal. "I knew (four-time Boston Marathon champion) Bill Rodgers had won this race in 52:30 (in 1975), and I wanted to see if I could beat that time. Near the end, when I saw the finish-line clock, I was really pushing it."

Camargo similarly had her eye on a target time: the women's course record of 57:05 held by Nancy Conz of Southampton. Camargo ran the first two miles well under that pace, but the middle miles and the final mile are the most difficult on the course, and despite her obvious strength and intense focus, Camargo met her limits.

"Oh, it was very hard!" she said. "A lot of uphills. I ran for the record, but I did not feel so good."

A shot at the women's course record wasn't unthinkable. Last year Camargo ran a marathon in two hours, 35 minutes, the fastest time of 2006 for any South American woman, and she raced a mile in 4:24, also the year's best for that continent. This summer she will represent Argentina in the marathon at the Pan American Games.

No one was expecting Moulton or anyone else to break the men's record of 48:57, set by Bob Hodge in 1984 when the race served as the national 10-mile championship for the Road Runners Club of America.

"Nobody'll ever touch that," said Moulton. "It's crazy."

Despite the way the two top finishers consigned the rest of the field to battle for second place, the race provided ample excitement. As usual the field was large, since it is one of the region's few longer events this time of year and is a popular tune-up for the Boston Marathon seven weeks hence.

Many of the runners up front, including Borling, Hayden and Giesler, were wearing the bright red and white singlets of the Greater Boston Track Club, coached by Tom Derderian who designed this course in 1975. He was on hand Sunday to introduce it to several of his current pupils.

Borling, a 26-year-old graduate student in journalism at Boston University, certainly liked it. "It was a blast," he said. "Tom wanted us to run it to win, but as soon as we saw Casey was here, we figured, well, running for second place will be OK."

For the first half, Borling and half a dozen other Greater Boston runners followed last year's winner, Paul Low, 33, of Belchertown, and Andy McCarron, 24, a powerful runner originally from Lunenburg who recently moved to Amherst. McCarron overtook Low, and then Borling overtook both of them between the six- and seven-mile markers.

"(McCarron) was tough," Borling remarked. "When I passed him, he hung on -- which was odd, because usually when you pass someone they drop back out of the rear-view mirror. He didn't." McCarron finished third by 15 seconds in 53:30.

Borling's teammates Edward Breen, 25, of Medford (53:54) and David Bedoya, 30, of Somerville (54:00) both passed Low, who settled for sixth (54:51) on what he described as an off day. "I felt clumsy out there, not prepared to run 10 miles on roads," Low said.

Four women finished in a cluster to take fourth through seventh places: Barb McManus, 39, of Oakham (1:05:26); Simonetta Piergentil, 42, of Wilmington (1:05:42); Kelli Lusk, 36, of Belchertown (1:05:49); and Megha Doshi, 24, of Medford (1:05:53).

Piergentil won the women's over-40 trophy. Top man in that category was Paul Fratini, 41, of Ludlow, in 58:36. Record-holder Bob Hodge, now 51, finished in 1:12:44, good for 97th place overall.

Derderian stood near the finish line greeting many runners, including Kibrom Temelso, 31, a native of Ethiopia who now lives in Waltham and trains with the Greater Boston club. He finished seventh in 55:29. Also finishing well was Derderian's English friend Will Cockerell, a member of the Belgrave Harriers in London. Cockerell, 33, placed 13th overall in 57:29 and was as impressed as everyone else by the course.

"Those hills!" he said to Derderian. "I almost had to walk."

"Well," said Derderian, "the idea of this course was to prepare you for Boston."