July 27, 2000
The winner of Saturday’s egalitarian, performance-based 5K road race in Riverhead was a 48-year-old woman, Kathy Martin. The top man that day, Don DiDonato, 42, placed third. Three of the top four finishers were women, a 66-year-old man was ninth, and a 10-year-old boy was 10th.
That rare age and gender mix in the top 10 was the result of Joe Sullivan’s “Panathon,” a handicapped race with reverse wave starts based on a scale derived from averaging best-ever performances in 44 age groups over the past 30 years.
While Martin, a Northport resident with two world age-group records to her credit, has won races outright, she was not the fastest that day. That distinction went to Rafael Veras, 30, with a net time of 15 minutes and 28 seconds. But Martin’s 17:59, reportedly a personal best, was, vis-a-vis the best-ever 5K times recorded by 48-year-old women, the day’s best performance.
Martin began 31 minutes and 2 seconds after the first competitors had left the line in the tortoise-and-hare affair, and, as was the case with everyone, ran scared.
“That’s one of the nice things about this kind of race,” Sullivan said later. “You really don’t know who’s going to win, and because of that everyone’s running scared. . . . It’s not about the fastest time, it’s about the best performance vis-a-vis the best performances ever.”
. . . While the inaugural Panathon drew only 112 entrants, “there were some phenomenal runners here,” said Sullivan, who added that he was satisfied that his handicapping scale was “very accurate” and that “the concept is good — it works.” He’d like to take the race, whose major sponsor was Krinos Foods, “to the national level.”
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Kyle Cashin, 30, who has owned the Montauk Lighthouse Sprint Triathlon in recent years, bested a field of 328 over the half-mile swim, 10-mile bike, and 3-mile run course Sunday in 1 hour, 1 minute, and 54 seconds. The Amagansett triathlete’s time was comparable to those he posted in winning the event in 1997 and 1998.
. . . The women’s winner that day was Sag Harbor’s Sinead FitzGibbon, 30, who placed 18th over all in 1:08:33.
. . . Chris Pfund said concerning the recent North Fork Sprint Triathlon that he was hesitant at first when his 7-year-old son, Brian, asked if he could do it. “But he was determined. We did a run-through in Montauk. When he got tired in the swim, he hung on my shoulder. He went through the transitions exactly as he should. He rode 10 to 11 miles on the bike with Brad Huff, who’s a member of the U.S. cycling team. He ran 2.4 miles. He was ready.”
The elder Pfund reported that his son had done the swim in 32 minutes, the bike in 37, and the run in 47, finishing with a kick. “He really let it loose in the last tenth of a mile. I was sprinting to keep up with him. Everybody cheered him on. He didn’t want to do the kids’ race. He wanted to do the one I would do. He was very proud of himself.”
. . . The youngest division in the main event was 15 to 18, the youngest in the youth race was 8 to 14. Brian, nevertheless, received a first-place trophy at the awards ceremony.
