Where Your Dreams Become
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Women Dominate 2008 LetsRun.com Men's Marathon Trials Contest At letsrun.com, many of our site visitors loves to think how smart they are and how they know everything there is to know about running. Now don't get us wrong the collective wisdom of the letsrun.com community is tremendous and our visitors are the crème de la crème of the running world. When we have our world famous prediction contests, the smarts of our clientele, often come out. It's not rare for an All American or even an US Record Holder (Lisa Galaviz, the US record holder in the steeplechase) to triumph in one of our contests. However, the results of our 2008 Marathon Trials Contest could turn the running world upside down. Our winner, she (yes she), has never competed competitively in running, and is in the 8th grade. Yes ladies in gentleman, an 8th grade soccer player, Lizzy F, won our world famous prediction contest. So all the male chauvinists and all the ol' timers dismissive of today's youth can be quiet. Lizzy F is the Queen of LetsRun.com. Much of the credit for Lizzy Frazee winning our contest goes to her PE teacher and letsrun.com fan Gary Droze. If everyone in America was like Gary, then the sport of running would return to its glory days in popularity. Instead of just complaining about our sports lack of popularity, Gary decided to get his PE students interested in running. So when the Olympic Marathon Trials came around, Gary realized our contest would be the perfect vehicle to increase awareness of the sport of running with his students. He came up with his own "Sweet 16" list for the contenders at the Olympic Trials and gave it to his students with capsules describing each of the top runners. Then he turned them loose to analyze the field and reminded them not to copy his list verbatim (fortunately his students are too smart for that as they all beat him). The results were amazing. Lizzy won the contest by being the only person in our contest to pick the first 4 perfectly correctly. 3 of her fellow classmates were in the top 30 of our contest. Gary says that is not the highlight for him. The highlight was: "...overhearing (the) kids banter and enthuse about elite runners they'd never heard of the week before. At least a few non-running students came to appreciate that the marathon is not a jog at the paces the top guys run. I'm pretty sure four of my kids ended up in the top 30 of your results. The ones who did the best disagreed with my notion that the home-grown Americans would get edged out for the team spots by the transplants. Lizzy was the best example of youthful optimism...I suspect she picked Ryan and Dathan because they were closer to high school age than my own top picks!" Coming in second in our Marathon Trials Prediction Contest was Becca Moore. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, women went 1-2 in our prediction contest (for some reason because more men than women come to our site that means we're all sexist). Becca, like our own Wejo, was one of only 6 people to pick the first 3 perfectly correctly. Her picking strategies were pretty sound, "Ryan Hall is on fire, never count out Dathan because he will fight to the end, and Brian Sell has been consistently putting in high mileage and improving." Becca is an avid fan of the sport who just loves running. As she says, "(I) Simply run because I love it. I am decent but not great and probably wont ever be but I love the sport, the science behind it, the training, and can appreciate the talent of others that can kick my butt on any given day." Congrats Becca, Both Becca and Lizzy get gift certificates from RoadRunnerSports. If you'd like to support LetsRun.com and at the same time save 10% from RoadRunner click here Tomorrow we'll have a recap of our NCAA XC Prediction Contest and news of a LetsRun.com first- a repeat winner in one of our contests.
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