First and foremost, no serious pandemic impact this year, finally! Our biggest disruptor has actually been on the weather side which I would qualify as a better change for once, after several years leading to a terrible drought in the West. But I'm sensitive that this bad weather did impact negatively some, from home owners to farmers and hitting closer to our MUT home, Race Directors.
That El Niño pattern led to the cancellation of CTR's (Coastal Trail Runs) Crystal Spring Trail Half in January. Wendell kindly offered registrants to transfer their entries to Lake Chabot in April but Lake Chabot was still overflowing so we ended up racing ITR's (Inside Trail Racing) Woodside Crossover instead. And not even crossing over Skyline because of the damage to the park on the other side of the Woodside hills.
In addition to the weather impact, we suffered from two consequences of last year's coyote snafu involving Dean Karnazes at the Headlands 100 in August. First, PCTR lost some of its balance and had to cancel our only Mountain format event, Mt Diablo 10K. Second, CTR lost their overnight permit which was meant to allow us to run for 24 hours around Crissy Field. In concertation with the team captains, and Wendell again, we scaled back to the 12-hour option, losing our only 2x factor scoring event of the year.
The rest of the year seemed eventless in comparison, although everyone had their own unique experiences and adventures, for sure.
From an organizational standpoint, the big change for the MUT Committee was to get the help of Kendra who got volunteered by Shiran and accepted to give a try to the scoring, mid year. After losing our original scorer extraordinaire, Gary Wang, a few years ago, scoring responsibilities fell back on the Chair who already had a full-time job. Besides, Kendra also brought her fresh look on my scoring process as well as the reading and interpretation of our MUT Rules. I much look forward to a continuation of the improvement of that process through 2024 and beyond!
From a result standpoint, the team competition has been dominated by Pamakis again. Their MUT team excelled through the Captain transition from Penn to Shiran. Still, the Men competition remained fierce until the very last race of the season with Pamakids winning over Quicksilver by a mere point, as a result of Excelsior missing to win the 50K at Ruth Anderson. 1 point over 15 scoring events, that was close!
Final rankings:
- Women: 1. Pamakis - 2. Impala - 3. Lake Merritt Joggers & Striders
- Men: 1. Pamakids - 2. Quicksilver - 3. Excelsior
- Mixed: 1. Pamakids - 2. Excelsior - 3. San Francisco Running Company
- Overall: 1. Pamakids - 2. Quicksilver - 3. Excelsior
Congratulations and respect to Pamakids for another Grand Slam! Up to the other clubs to show what they are capable of to dethrone them in 2024, in a fair game of course!
A few team pictures from Woodside (No)Crossover in April:
On the individual side, we had a bit of a dilemma which delayed the finalization of our age group winners. When Nakia and I introduced the extension of our Grand Prix to the whole MUT format in 2018, we stated a minima of 1 score on the newly added sub-ultra trail races. The rules were amended in that sense and in line with the three sports which MUT represent: Mountain, Ultra and Trail running. Now, and starting at the international level governing MUT, there remains an ambiguity created by the overlap of ultra and trail formats. To make the matter worse while I rightly tagged each race as Ultra OR Trail in the published scheduled, I made a mistake by adding in parenthesis the type of terrain for the ultra races, either Road or... Trail. Dang, talk about an unfortunate excess of zeal...
Listening to the people impacted, and the captains' perspectives, we decided to go with a lax definition of trail, including the ultra ones ran on trails. Rules will be fine-tuned and amended for 2024 to address this issue. And the schedule will state the category more clearly.
With that, here are your MUT Grand Prix champions for 2023:
- F20 Margie Cullen, Impala Racing Team
- F30 Katherine Song, Strawberry Canyon Track Club
- F40 Christina Vincent, Pamakids
- F50 Louise Stephens, Pamakids
- F60 Karen Romagnoli, Lake Merritt Joggers and Striders
- F70 Kat Powell, Pamakids
- M20 Victor Skorapa IV, Excelsior Running Club
- M30 Jakob Walter, Pamakids
- M40 Karl Schnaitter, Excelsior Running Club
- M50 Jean Pommier, Quicksilver Running Club of San Jose
- M60 Charles Blakeney, Quicksilver Running Club of San Jose
- M70 Carl Jacob, Tamalpa Runners, Inc
See all details and rankings on the Pacific Association page (standings).
In addition to some payouts for the season, the champions each get the grand and coveted prize of a 50% discount on every race registration fee through 2024. Depending on how many events they will enter, a benefit potentially worth close to $1,000! In case you had not realized... And some of them might tell you that this isn't necessarily a matter of placing first every time in your age group, as much as keeping showing up, finishing and being consistent. Speaking of showing up, I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge that David Tran, the new Captain for Excelsior, would have won his age group if he had run Ruth Anderson as opposed to just coming to encourage his teammates, not realizing Jakob had entered on race morning. Some of the suspense and climax which happened at this Grand Finale!
Stay tuned for the 2024 schedule which we are going to announce in a few days, as well as some details on the payouts, both for 2022 and 2023 (last update was for 2021, as part of my review of our 2022 season).
And thank you and congratulations to the 233 (97 women, 136 men) of you who scored in this MUT Grand Prix in 2023; a number which is still lower than our 2015 record of 384, but still shows recovery from the pandemic. By the way, that represents 462 scores, an average of 1.98 score/participant, with Shiran topping the chart again with 11 scores all for himself: dedication!
See all of you and many more, on our MUT circuit in 2024, thank you again for participating!
