Wintry Race at Red Creek
By Jack Graves
(03/21/2007) Bob Beattie, as promised, did hold a Last Day of Winter race on the trails at Red Creek Park in Hampton Bays Sunday, though a long swath of icy snow prevented him from starting the shortened 5K in the park.
“Instead, we ran a loop around the parking lot first,” said Beattie, “and then I started everyone on the trails in the places they’d been in when they came out of the parking lot, at one-second intervals.”
It was so cold, said Beattie, that his Seiko Timer wouldn’t print, so the times were lost. In the end, the course measured 2.18 miles, he said, rather than the originally planned 3.1.
Ben Turnbull, as he often does, led the field of 40 across the finish line, with Jim MacWhinnie right up there with him. “Jim thought it should be a tie, and he’s probably still mad at me,” Beattie said Monday. “We’ll call it a tie, then, but Ben got the trophy.” In any event, MacWhinnie, who won the last race at Red Creek, the 4K “Glove Run” in mid-December, topped the men’s 30-to-39 age group.
Laura Brown, who works at the Gubbins Running Ahead store in Southampton and at the Sportime tennis club in Quogue, was the women’s winner. She was seventh over all.
Quintin Maidment of East Hampton, the eighth-place finisher, won the boys 14-to-16-year-old group. His father, Paul, who finished 11th, topped the 50-to-59-year-old men.
Tony Venesina of Sag Harbor was the first finisher in the 60-to-69 group. He was 24th over all.
Beattie had spring on his mind Monday, although the weather was anything but. He said that on Friday he had received a permit from the East Hampton Village Board to hold a 4K in the village on Saturday, April 14.
It will be the first time in a while that a race has been run in the village. Registration and an after party will be held at the Gubbins New Balance store in East Hampton, Beattie said. The race is to start next to the East Hampton Presbyterian Church Session House on Huntting Lane. Runners will then make a loop, going out to Cross Highway on Hither Lane, and returning to the start-finish line via Middle and Egypt Lanes.
“It should be a fast, safe course,” said Beattie, whose employer, Barbara Gubbins, forwent the Last Day of Winter race because, she said, she was “afraid . . . I don’t run well in the snow.”
Gubbins was saving herself for the More magazine masters women’s half-marathon in New York City’s Central Park this Sunday. She and her daughter, Megan, will combine their times and ages (47 and 24) in hopes of winning an age-group award.
Gubbins didn’t hold out much hope of winning a cash prize by finishing among the top three duos. “They’re bringing in a lot of elite runners,” she said, checking out the Web site. “Look, there’s a 43-year-old woman who’s run a 2:41 marathon, and a 40-year-old who’s run a 1:11 half.”
“She’s been running more than me,” Gubbins said of her daughter. “She’s done some 11 and 12-mile runs. I’ve been running on a treadmill. My longest training run lately has been eight miles.”