Boulder – Two of the area’s top marathoners, Alan Culpepper and Colleen de Reuck, will drop down in distance Aug. 27 to race in the inaugural New York City Half-Marathon, race officials will announce today.
The 13.1-mile course will take runners on a loop through Central Park, down Seventh Avenue through Times Square, west on 42nd Street and south on the West Side Highway past the site of the World Trade Center to Battery Park, finishing with a view of the Statue of Liberty. The field, capped at 10,000, was sold out within hours.
“I like the concept of integrating the park, Times Square and Battery Park,” said Culpepper, 33, a resident of Lafayette.
Culpepper and de Reuck won their respective Olympic marathon trials in 2004, and both have targeted fall marathons. De Reuck will run Chicago on Oct. 22. Culpepper hasn’t made his plans public, but it wouldn’t be a surprise to see him turn up in New York on Nov. 5, because the men’s Olympic marathon trials will be there next year.
“I like racing half-marathons before marathons,” said de Reuck, a Boulder resident who ran Olympic marathons in 1992, 2000 and 2004.
Other elites in the field include marathon world-record holder Paul Tergat of Kenya, four-time Boston Marathon winner Catherine Ndereba of Kenya and Constantina Tomescu-Dita of Romania, the reigning half-marathon world champion.
“This race has been a dream for several years,” New York Road Runners president Mary Wittenberg said. “We have had a vision of creating another international-class event to complement the (New York City) marathon.”
Going for 50
Ultramarathoner Dean Karnazes will run the Boulder Backroads Marathon on Sept. 24 as part of his quest to run 50 marathons in 50 days in 50 states.
He is scheduled to begin Sept. 17 in St. Louis and finish at the New York City Marathon on Nov. 5.
“The mission of this event is to encourage others to be their own personal best, to inspire others to adopt a more healthy and physically active lifestyle,” said, Karnazes, who is coached by Carmichael Training Systems of Colorado Springs. “About a third of our youth – that’s 25 million kids – are overweight. To me, that’s a really, really sad statistic.”
