It’s a lazy Saturday here in Level Land, but thought I’d drop on by and pass along some items that I thought were news worthy.

Our Mizuno Mezamashii contest is over with. A few good things came out of this: we spread the word about what we’re doing here at the Level, we all learned a new word in Japanese, we hooked up a lucky member of Level Legion with her own Mezamashii experience, and after typing the word so many times, I can confidently say that I never hesitate to spell Mezamashii anymore.

Speaking of the winner, it was Anne Brown. She had this to say:

“I AM SO EXCITED. I have been following the Mezamashii project and love how Mizuno is reaching out and creating a community to share their brilliant runs. Nothing gets me more pumped than reading about someone’s run, to get me out the door running!”

We hope to have some more from her in the future. It’d be great to hear more from Anne about her experience in the project and also how her training is going in general.

In local racing news, there were a couple of big races in the area on Thursday July 12th featuring some very good performances by runners that have been featured On The Level:

The JP Morgan Chase Corporate Challenge was held in Boston, and had the usual sell out crowd. Level alumni Tim Ritchie (BC/BAA) and Kyle Lynn MacQueen (Wellington/GBTC) were the winners, with Ritchie breaking the tape in 17:24 MacQueen posting a 19:38. Both men’s and women’s races were close, but the women’s was closest as Kyle just eked out win over Joanna Murphy (Puma/NBB) by two seconds. You can find the race results here and a decent article here (including good pics of Ritchie and MacQueen).

For the team aspect of it, as usual Raytheon had a few guns up front. Paul Ryan was third (17:45) and Ryan Carrara was fifth (17:58). It seems to be a Corporate Challenge prerequisite that Carrara is up in the top five. He’s pretty much a fixture at this race. Justin Lutz is another guy who has done well there in the past. Where the heck was he?

Excellent question. Apparently he was out in Chicago on July 11th competing in the Corporate Challenge Championships. Damn, that’s big time. Read up on it here. Justin was fifth overall, and first American. Please join me in changing “U-S-A, U-S-A” in honor of Justin’s performance. I could be mistaking though. I stumbled upon that in looking up stuff for the Boston race. That event is not on the series calendar, so now I’m starting to wonder if the article is dated wrong? Either way, congrats Justin!

Puma put up a strong showing in the women’s team competition, garnering three of the top five spots. Coworkers (and GBTC teammates) Jennifer Walker and Victoria Barnaby came in fourth and fifth, respectively. Damn, the GBTC was pretty well represented out there by the ladies! Also, you may remember Victoria and Joanna from this great Penn Relays debacle.

Also on Thursday night was the Marathon Sports 5 Miler out in Weston, MA. You can see the results here, but the gist of it is that Eric Ashe (BAA) won a tightly contested race. The top three were all under 25 minutes, with Ashe leading that group with his 24:50. He was followed by Robert Gibson (24:53) and Peter Gilmore (24:55). Wow.

I should mention the full top five for men because it ties in with other things here. In fourth place was Chad Carr with a 25:45. Chad’s team: The Chad News Bears. Amazing. Chad’s teammate also happened to be the female champ, which was Kaitlin Anelauskas with a 29:11.

In fifth place was none other than Ian Nurse, making a repeat appearance On The Level so soon after he blew up the internet with his amazing Negative Splits workout piece yesterday.

That’s it for now. Thanks for reading and for helping us to spread the word (all those likes and shares and retweets help us out A TON).

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