2009 NYC Marathon Contest Recap

Editor's Note: Our World Famous Prediction Contests always show the best of LetsRun.com and the tremendously interesting and hard core fans of the sport that make up our viewers. We've had all-Americans, national champions, and rocket scientists win our contests in the past. This time was no different.

Hardly anyone picked the winners of this year's incredibly exciting ING NYC Marathon. A few brave souls on LetsRun.com did and they deserve recognition.

LetsRun.com's Rojo's stuck his foot in the mouth and guaranteed that one of his top 3 would win the ING NYC Marathon. As a result, we decided to give $50 to the person who most closely predicted the men's and women's winners and winning times.

Of course Meb Keflezighi was not in Robert's top 3 and Rojo was wrong. As a matter of fact, Meb was not in many people's top 3 as only 1.9% of you picked Meb to win.

Win One for Wetmore

Keenan Robbins a former runner for Mark Wetmore's NCAA powerhouse Colorado Buffaloes did have Meb down as the winner and was only 11 seconds off from Meb's winning time of 2:09:15. As a result Keenan won our men's contest.

We asked Keenan what he was up to and appreciated his humorous response,  "As far as an update, there's really very little to report. I am essentially a very boring person with not a lot going on and thus have plenty of time to do things like sit in my room, listen to Radiohead, and gather athletics-related information. I did run at CU briefly. Though it should be noted that I'm easily the worst person ever to be part of that program, at least in the Wetmore Era. Please don't hesitate to include that last bit in whatever you write up as I feel the Colorado program would be unfairly tarnished if my name were mentioned in connection with it and there wasn't an explanation of me as some kind of outlier."

Hardly anyone had Derartu Tulu as the winner of the NYC Marathon, but Ryan Ogliore did. Not only did he predict Tulu, but he also predicted her slow winning time.  Those of you who know Ryan should not be surprised. Not only is he a previous winner of a LetsRun.com contest (proving he's really smart), but he also is a rocket scientist (well at least a postdoctoral reasearcher in planetary science studying comet dust samples at UC Berkeley, showing also he is really smart). You can tell Ryan is a hard core LetsRun fan because he ran NY this year in a very respectable 3:07, but said he was "rather embarrassed of my time". An achilles injury kept him away from his goal of 2:40.

Ryan adds, "Actually I won a letsrun track prediction contest a couple years ago and didn't receive my LetsRun T-Shirt. No big deal of course, but if you send it I'll wear it with pride."

Well Ryan hasn't received his tshirt because we never have made LetsRun.com tshirts. We've still got the list of winners and promise they'll get their shirts when the first batch of letsrun.com shirts are made. Ryan's $50 check is in the mail. We promise.

2010 in the Track and Field World Explained
And a close runner-up on the men's side was Arthur Tyler. He predicted Meb would win but in 2:09:32 so he finished 2nd in the contest by only 6 seconds.  Tyler's story is a good one and he tells us what will happen this fall and next year in track and  field:

 "My name is Arthur Tyler and I'm a college student at Quinnipiac University right now. Unfortunately they cut their track team after i declared so for this year at least i'm running solely on my own. I'm a long hurdler and a vaulter myself, although i'm a total distance fan. I was up at 3AM every morning during the Olympics to catch all the events. So far as further predictions go, CD's got NCAAs, Rupp takes down the 10k AR at the Cardinal, and Webb hits a sub 8:10 in the 2 mile."

We didn't know Stanford's Chris Derrick had his own abbreviation with sprinters or anyone for that matter but from now on Chris Derrick is known as CD. Alan Webb we hope you're reading this.