Gardner Wins National 24 Hour Title, Just Misses U.S. Record at Ultracentric
Sweeney debuts as U.S. men's champion

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By Dan Brannen
Posted Wednesday, 21 November, 2007

Connie Gardner was the whole story of the 20th U.S. National 24 Hour Run Championship, hosted by the Ultracentric 24 Hour on November 17-18 in Grapevine, Texas, a Dallas suburb. The 44-year-old Medina, Ohio endurance athlete, a former 100K national champion and U.S. National 100K Team member, had moved up to the all-day/all-night event at the Ultracentric national title race last November.

She had an impressive debut there, running just under 133 miles to place third and make the National 24 Hour Run team, despite slowing dramatically in the final two hours. But at the World 24 Hour, held in Canada in July, she succumbed to heat, humidity and an overly ambitious early pace and had to sit out the last few hours, falling off the national team scoring chart in the process.

Meanwhile, there seemed to be no serious challengers to the U.S. women's "absolute" 24 hour record (i.e., the best of road, track and indoor track) among the current crop of top U.S. women. That record (145.28 miles) had been set back in 1993 in ideal conditions by Sue Ellen Trapp, one of the "living legends" of the ultra sport. No U.S. woman had come within 5 miles of it since then.

This year's Ultracentric National Championship was cursed by oppressive conditions (daytime temperatures approaching 80 degrees, with humidity peaking at near 90%), and it became a battle of attrition. Nearly every serious competitor had the proverbial "bad day," although Akos Konya, a Hungarian living in Southern California who has been a top finisher in the U.S. title race the past few years, had a better day than everyone else, this time winning with a personal best 146.25 miles. Behind Konya, Bob Sweeney, one of the top American 100K runners of the past decade, whose only foray beyond that distance had been his USA 100 Mile title a few years ago, made his debut at the 24 hour event a successful one, taking the men's national title just shy of 140 miles. And he was given chase near the end by the age-defying 59-year-old Roy Pirrung, who had won the inaugural National 24 Hour crown way back in 1988, then again in 1991, and has been a top 5 finisher in most years of the intervening two decades.

Yet Sweeney duplicated the dubious distinction of Scott Demaree, who won the National 24 Hour title in Queens, N.Y. back in 1989 (with virtually the same distance as Sweeney), only to finish behind Ann Trason, who ran 143+ miles in that race to set the U.S. record which Trapp would break 4 years later, the first woman ever to win a combined men's/women's national athletics championship. This time the distaff subjugator was Gardner, who near the end almost caught the foreign "guest" Konya. Perhaps Gardner had greater motivation, knowing for the last 2 hours that she was maintaining, literally to the second, national record pace.

The Ultracentric course is a 2 mile loop, and during the final 45 minutes the participants are transferred onto a contiguous 1/4 mile loop so they can all be carefully monitored and stopped right when the final horn sounds 24:00:00. For the last half-hour the short loop was ringed by wildly cheering spectators and virtually all of the support crews of the 100+ participants, urging Gardner on in her nail-biting record chase. This time she did not falter, but held a remarkably steady pace given the defiance she had shown all day and night to the decidedly non-record friendly conditions. When the final horn sounded, it was too close to call. Neither she nor any of the officials could tell immediately whether the record was hers.

But when the final partial-lap distance was measured, and added to the combined total of long laps plus short laps, the heartbreaking reality emerged: Connie Gardner had fallen short of Sue Ellen Trapp's 14-year-old U.S. record by about 40 meters. Which is probably equivalent to the extra distance she had covered in using the portable toilets a few times during the race. To put into perspective how close she came, it would be like missing the U.S. women's marathon record by mere hundredths of a second. Ironically, distance-defined road race records (such as the marathon) are always rounded up to the nearest even second. If an equivalent policy of rounding up to the nearest quarter-mile (or even the nearest 100 meters) were in place for time-defined records (i.e., 1 hour, 12 hours, 24 hours), Gardner would now be the co-holder of the U.S. 24 Hour record.

22nd Ultracentric 24 Hour: National Championship
Grapevine, TX, Saturday - Sunday, November 17-18, 2007
Conditions: warm & humid

MEN
1) Akos Konya, 33, Hungary (Guest), 146.25 miles
2) Bob Sweeney, 40, Rye Brook, NY, 139.5 miles (national champion), $250*
3) Roy Pirrung, 59, Kohler, WI, 138.5 miles
4) Phil McCarthy, 39, New York, NY, 129.0 miles
5) Steven Escaler, 30, 121.5 miles

WOMEN
1) Connie Gardner, 44, Medina, OH, 145.26 miles (national champion), $4000* (#2 all-time U.S. women, performance/performer)
2) Debra Horn, 48, Shaker Heights, OH, 127.0 miles
3) Carilyn Johnson, 40, 126.75 miles
4) Jamie Donaldson, 33, 119.25 miles
5) Karen Gall, 48, 114.0 miles
*Prize funds for U.S. athletes based on achieving minimum performance standards

Deeper results at: www.Ultracentric.net

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