Loon Mountain Race results

I don't know but when I ran it as a US Champs and placed top 10 it was a legit beast of a course and I've never been back. You go out in 4:40/mile pace and start climbing, plateau a bit, climb again, then it's massive downhill you go psycho on before the Wall. And it's usually 90-degrees fresh grass smell and feel. great race.

Thank you. Altitude athletes win again. Did the men and women run the same course today?

Yes, they did as it makes sense, the first chick. (Lauren Gregory) beat the first Masters (Eric Blake)

I asked because the men ran comparatively much quicker on Upper Walking Boss.

And the first master wasn’t Eric Blake. It was Joe Gray.

I don't count Joe as a Master... he's a freak. But you are right.

40 is 40!!! Give Gray his due.

I just checked Strava. men/women ran different courses unless there is a huge GPS error. Looks like Gregory ran 5.69 and McCandless ran 6.1 miles. I don’t see Gray’s Strava. It’s not uncommon to have different lengths for men and women like in the NCAA.

great race by Gregory and Gray. good luck to them in Europe.

Unless there was a moose re-route, official course 6.03mi for both genders.

six03endurance.com

Loon Mountain Race — SIX03 Endurance

A mountain trail race that climbs 6.03 miles to the summit of Loon Mountain in Lincoln, New Hampshire. Host to multiple USA Mountain Running Championships. Open to all ages and abilities.

Open link

The top 50 or so women missed a turn shortly after the halfway point. There’s a sharp left before the crest of a hill that leads to a 0.6ish mile loop back down the hill and back up it again from the other side. I don’t think it was marked well, and I can see how it was missed, because the course picks right back up at the top of the hill again. You can see this clearly if you compare strava maps of men and women. The loop is even a segment (“Loon 22 New Loop Why Not”). Tyler McCandless (who had a commanding lead at that point in the race) ran the loop in 6 minutes, and the women’s Strava CR on that segment is 7:30. So the women’s times are likely 7-8 minutes faster than they should have been.
They would have to DQ pretty much the entire women’s field if they wanted to play this by the book.
At some point they must have stationed a course monitor there, or maybe the slower women were able to notice the little flags better, because the back of the pack women and all men (who started 30 minutes later) ran the loop and full course.

De

Does anyone know the first women that went the full course?

The section the women cut off was flagged blue for running down. The women were through 5ish miles in about 37 minutes, with the men in about 34 minutes.

https://www.strava.com/segments/37268435?filter=overall

Isolating the segment leaderboard to Women and This Year for this segment:

Dawn Roberts ran the segment the fastest, and finished highest up the leaderboard from the looks of things (145 overall; 46th woman). So of all the women publicly on Strava leaderboards, she was the first finisher to run the full course.

The next step of research would be to Strava search the women in the race results ahead of her to find the last one with a 5.5(ish) mile race result from yesterday. Somewhere between these two would be the first full course finisher.

Someone would not show up on the segment if they had their profile or activity set to private so there might be someone higher up the standings who ran it. Either way, given Lauren’s 7:30 on the segment in 2022, it’s safe to say that if there is a woman out there who can prove she ran the full course and finished around an hour then she has a legit beef with these results and got robbed of a trip to Italy.

40th place has a Strava with with the 5.5 mile race distance and that segment cut off. Everyone between 40 and 46 is either private or not on Strava.

This likely means that the first full course finisher was either the 46th place finisher, or someone between 40th and 46th place.

(Unless someone who ran the full 6.1 managed to make up that 8+min gap in the second half and finish ahead of 40th, which I do not think is likely given the fact that it's a pretty significant gap to make up, and they have an extra climb on their legs.)

Completely agree that no one got robbed, and the winners deserved to win. But this kind of Strava deep dive is the exact kind of thing I needed to keep me looking busy at work after my lunch break the day after 4th of July weekend, so please don't fault me for this.

I think it's unlikely anyone in that 40-50th place range really cares either way. I do think the results could have been shaken up a little due to cutting out not just 0.6 miles, but also a fairly significant steep downhill and climb back up. The correct team is being sent to Italy though, so the RD will likely look the other way this time. Next time, however, they should really make sure there are actual human course monitors at significant turns on the course like this.