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Fortitude Was on the Menu at OMAC Awards

Tue, 12/10/2019 - 16:06
The Old Montauk Athletic Club’s award winners were, from left at top, Tom Desmond, Sophia Swanson, Julia Brierley, Kal Lewis, and, above, Jill Robins, M.E. Adipietro (shown with her husband, Dr. Frank Adipietro), and Jim MacWhinnie.
Jack Graves Photos

Fortitude and persistence were on the menu, as it were, at the Old Montauk Athletic Club’s holiday awards dinner on Dec. 2.

Jim MacWhinnie, the club’s male athlete of the year, almost died a decade ago when a 330-gallon fuel oil tank that he was helping to move fell upon him, lacerating his liver and causing other life-threatening internal injuries.

Julia Brierley, an East Hampton High School senior who received the William A. O’Donnell youth swimming athlete award, competed at a high level this fall, a season that ended for her in the state meet, after having been diagnosed with Epstein-Barr virus and, on two occasions, with Lyme disease, each of them severely enervating illnesses.

Her father, Craig Brierley, the girls swimming coach, who spoke for her at the South Fork Country Club in Amagansett that night, said she had demurred, and had continued to persist and to turn in personal-best times, whenever he suggested she take time off.

Jill Robins of Montauk, the club’s female athlete of the year, a mother of three who teaches English to international students at Stony Brook University, also runs ultramarathons.

Erin Tintle, the club’s awardee in 2016, who often runs the trails in Montauk with Robins and Caroline Cashin, said Robins had, despite suffering a foot injury in the early going, finished this past summer’s Vermont 100 — an ultra race in the Green Mountains of southern Vermont with 17,000 feet of elevation from which a good many in the field drop out — in 27 hours, 40 minutes, and 20 seconds.

“She’s very modest — she just loves to run,” said Tintle. “She told us at the beginning of an 8-mile run loop we were running in the hills a couple of weeks ago not to worry if she fell behind. Afterward, we learned she’d run in the JFK 50 Miler [in Hagerstown, Md.] that Saturday.”

While the above were salient examples, it is fair to say that fortitude and persistence are traits shared by all the awardees, in whose number were M.E. Adipietro of Shelter Island, the longtime director of the Shelter Island 10K, one of the country’s most popular road races, and the Shelter Island 5K, a breast cancer fund-raiser in the fall in which, it seems, the island’s entire population participates.

Over the years — Cliff Clark passed the 10K baton in 1990 — she and her husband, Frank Adipietro, have attracted to the race hundreds more entrants and such well-known distance runners as Joan Benoit-Samuelson, Bill Rodgers, Meb Keflezighi, Kim Jones, Jon Sinclair, Keith Brantly, Amby Burfoot, and Simon Ndirangu, whose course-record time of 28:37, set in 2012, still stands.

Another Shelter Islander, Kal Lewis, who led his school’s cross-country team to five county championships, and who, himself, won three state titles in a row, an apparently unprecedented feat, according to Todd Gulluscio, Shelter Island’s athletic director, was also an OMAC honoree.

“What people don’t see in all the newspaper articles about his running accomplishments is what a wonderful person he is,” Gulluscio said. “No one is at Kal’s level, but he’s a real team guy. Because we’re such a small school we have seventh graders on our team and Kal interacts with them. He helps everyone. He’s a fine young runner, but he’s even more special as a person.”

The club’s male and female East Hampton High School athletes were Sophia Swanson, a swimmer and lifeguard who has competed internationally, and Tom Desmond, a soccer and baseball player who is an all-county student-athlete.

Swanson, who competed in three events at the recent state swimming meet, has swum and played softball at the varsity level since her eighth-grade year, has competed with the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter’s youth team, the Hurricanes, since the age of 8 — qualifying for the Y nationals in each of the past four years — and has been a triathlete since the age of 12.

A certified ocean lifeguard and a member of the United States’ under-19 team, she assists with the Hampton Lifeguard Association’s junior lifeguard and nipper programs in the summer, and, in September, represented the United States at the International Surf Rescue Challenge in Durban, South Africa. She has also, with buildOn, a nonprofit youth service group, helped build a school in Nepal.

Desmond, said Lisa Farbar, East Hampton High’s strength and conditioning coach, was “a true OMAC athlete, a great student and athlete, and, most of all, kind. He’s always willing to lend younger kids a hand in the fitness center. He’ll help me in the baseball and agility clinics this spring. . . .”

In his class’s top 10 percent, the young Montauker, whose mother was born in Ecuador, has played the flute for the past nine years, is fluent in Spanish, is learning on his own Mandarin and advanced computer coding, and is helping to build a school in Guatemala with buildOn.

Regarding MacWhinnie, whose guests that night included family members and his jiu-jitsu instructor, Greg Melita, Dennis Fabiszak, one of those who gave blood to see him through operations at Stony Brook Hospital, said, “Many of us here have trained with Jim, been trained by him, and have raced against him, and, 10 years on, he’s racing better than he ever has before. His comeback — from death — was unbelievable. He showed us how you can build yourself back up — we all watched it happen. We’ve seen for ourselves what somebody’s capable of. It’s really inspiring.”


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