Wednesday Night Results

So, the Webster Distance Runners were out and about on Wednesday night. A trio of seniors "manned up" and went to the challenging Dirt Cheap Trail Race at Ellison Wetlands. Geoff, John and Joe went 1-3-6 in the 19 & Under age group, with Geoff taking second place overall! Penfield star Katie Lembo was the overall women's winner, with an impressive time.

Other WDR connections spotted at the race included 2008 grad, Claire McMahon and her older brother Bobby, also a Schroeder XC alumnus, as well as some current WDR parents: Craig and Ellen Mallery and Kristen Kelly.

Meanwhile the Lyons boys took to Mendon Ponds Park for an orienteering doubleheader. First up was the Sprint course, which was just a little on the short side at 2.1km straight-line distance, but it included a staggering 105m of climb. Ahead of the race it was clearly a two-man battle for the win between recent WDR Nate Lyons and on of Syracuse U's current distance runners, Erin Schirm. Nate was actually ahead of the Schirminator thru 9 controls, and only down 1 second after 11, but the SU runner's speed on the trails was too much in the end and he prevailed: 11:48 to 12:03. Zach Lyons captured 3rd in 16:58, while Coach Lyons experienced a couple of disasters to fall back to 22:01. Future WDR Luke Lyons dominated the White course, winning by 9.5 minutes in 10:29.

After a very brief break came the Score-O event, where each competitor had 60 minutes to score as many points as possible. The added trick this time was that only 20 of the 29 controls were on the map, the other 9 could be found on map snippets located at designated controls. Erin Schirm managed to clear the course in 52:00. Nate finished in 48:52, but did not write down the location of the extra controls, so just visited the higher-point controls from memory. Unfortunately, his memory failed, not on a control location - he got there - but on forgetting to punch. This caused him to fall back to 3rd place. Zach was 4th. Coach Lyons forgot about the different point values (ranged from 2-47) and got suckered into getting some low point controls and only managed 9th place. Luke led his grandfather around the course and finished 13th.