7 Sisters Trail Run (My Mt. Holyoke Homecoming) BY DANIEL F. SYMANCYK
S everal years ago, while surfing the web in pursuit of news about the latest ultra exploits of Charlie Muskin and Will Myers, I stumbled upon a link that ultimately brought me to a race near my roots. I found a 20k race called the 7 Sisters Trail Run which takes place on the Mt. Holyoke Range in Western Massachusetts. I was immediately interested, but my enthusiasm diminished as I learned from race results posted on the race’s website that it was normally held on the first Sunday in May which is on a weekend reserved for helping the Annapolis Striders with the Governor’s Bay Bridge Run. I had all but forgotten about the race un- til I heard people talking about trying to get into the Pittsburgh Marathon since the 2003 Bay Bridge Run was being canceled that year. I then decided to see if there was still a 7 Sis- ters 20k that weekend. A trip to its website revealed that there was, that the course was the same, but that the 20k had been changed to 12 miles.
Mt. Holyoke many times and had even run up it several years ago with my daughter, but each time it had been on roads and not the trails that were waiting for me in this race. While this series of no- name mountains be- tween Bare Mountain and Mt. Holyoke was constantly on the horizon during my youth, the terrain was unknown to me. Being able to explore them added to my enthusiasm for the race. While this East-to-West range, with its highest peak at 1010 feet, is certainly not the Rockies nor even very high by Vermont and New Hampshire standards, I knew from past experience and research that I was in for quite a race. The participants’ times in pre- vious years ranged from a course record of 1 hour and 43 minutes set in 2002 by United States mountain racing team member, Paul Lowe, to over 5 hours and 30 minutes. I es- timated that each year the median seemed to be about 3 hours and thought that surely I could do 12 miles at 15 minutes per mile. While I was a middle of the pack road racer at the time, I was more likely to be in the second to last or even last decile in an ul- tra. Further calculations would be necessary to get a better estimate of how long it would take me to complete the race, which while it is not an ultra-event seemed to have ultra-like paces. Fortunately, in sifting through JFK results, I recognized the name of someone from my hometown who finished the 50 near Matt Mace. The young man was just a toddler when I delivered newspapers to his home and I discovered that he also had a 7 Sisters time.
ing at a pace under 3 miles per hour. The morning of the race was sunny but cool with a predicted high in the 60s. Since we had taken the Montrealer from the BWI train station and not rented a car, my father drove me to the race. He noted that the crowd of runners was not representative of the general population since he did not see any overweight individuals. I was not surprised by this but did note how young the field was. As I stood in the registration line in the Notch Visitors Center and looked up at Bare Moun- tain through the huge windows in the center, I could see that the mountain’s deciduous trees, which were just spouting little specks of green, did not hide the rough and steep ter- rain that supported the trees. This race would
Using x as my predict- ed 7 Sisters time, I reasoned that Mike’s 7 Sisters time was to his JFK time as x was to my JFK time. This sim- ple equation yielded an estimate of 4 hours and 12 minutes for my 7 Sisters time. My ego was bruised even be- fore my muscles got sore when I realized that I was likely look-
The race’s website described the course in one place as 12 very rocky and hilly miles and in another as a virtual roller coaster. The out and back course along hiking trails starts at the Notch Visitors Center in Amh- erst, Massachusetts, goes up and down Bare Mountain, Mt. Hitchcock, a series of seven no-name mountains, Mt. Holyoke, and then reverses direction and goes back to the start. I had climbed Bare Mountain when I was a teenager so I knew that the website’s claim that “most of you will start out walking or soon will be walking” was true. I had climbed
14 THE STREAK I A PUBLICATION FOR MEMBERS OF THE ANNAPOLIS STRIDERS
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online