Monday, June 29, 2009

INTRODUCTION TO MIDNIGHT SUN RUN MASTERS RECORDS AND RANKINGS

Here we go! The much unanticipated initial foray into the deveolopment of what will become The Official Midnight Sun Run Masters Records and Ranking list. Now 27 years old, the Midnight Sun Run in Fairbanks, Alaska has a rich history, and it even has its own Wikipedia entry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_Sun_Run#Race_history

As an old school runner who started out in the first running boom of the 1970s, I'm a big fan the 10K distance. 10Ks used to be The Benchmark race distance, where the milers met the marathoners and races were ubiquitous. Now with the rise in popularity of 5Ks, marathons, and 1/2 marathons (and locally trail runs) we have just a handful of accessible 10Ks, most very early in the season.

I'm also a fan of the Midnight Sun Run; it's a fun community event with something for everyone. So I've started compiling data from past editions of the Midnight Sun run to document results from masters (40 to 80s) runners. The history of masters running at the Midnight Sun Run is also full of fast times, but so far no one has maintained a records database for age group times, let alone a rankings list.

Over the next weeks I'll be posting up preliminary lists, garnered from the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. We're missing a couple of years of data (1984 and 1989), so feel free to contact me by email (rwsayre@hotmail.com) if you have information on those years, or if there are corrections.

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