Phillips, Curtis, Miller, Vradenburgh win FCA races

Twenty-one minutes after Geno Phillips added to his large total, Jeremy Miller earned his first Chattanooga-area running victory Monday morning in the 5k/10k for FCA race at Chattanooga State.

Miller was the overall 10-kilometer winner in 37 minutes, 55 seconds, and Chattanooga Patriots home-school program alumna Karla Vradenburgh was the first female in 44:47.

A current Patriots runner, 15-year-old Jonathan Boyd, gave the 44-year-old Phillips a battle to the end of the 27th annual 5k benefiting area Fellowship of Christian Athletes work. Phillips, who won the second running of the FCA 10k last year and the Run for Honor 8k on Sunday, returned to the 5k Monday because it remains the FCA points race on the Chattanooga Track Club schedule.

Phillips, a Red Bank Middle School teacher and coach who won the FCA 5k also in 2005, caught Boyd in the final strides and nosed him out, each clocked in 16:55.

“I’m used to losing races like that,” Phillips said.

“I don’t have much of a kick at the end,” said Boyd, who won the first high school cross country race of the season last Tuesday. “I just tried to hold him off.”

That was the ninth FCA 5k in a row for the young Ooltewah resident.

Dean Thompson, who won the 5k in 2014, completed his ninth consecutive top-five finish in the race by finishing third for the fourth time in seven years. The masters winner (17:19) had a good view of the top-two battle.

“That was fun to watch,” Thompson said. “There was never more than a second or two between them.”

Said Phillips: “That was the key – staying with him. The race felt faster than what it was.”

Jennifer Curtis was the women’s winner of the points race, 33rd overall in 20:55. She and Phillips each got $50 in gift cards from Chili’s, and Curtis won the last door prize awarded Monday, a pair of New Balance shoes from the Front Runner store.

As for the race, “My time wasn’t what I wanted it to be, but I pushed on. And it was for a great cause. I was in the FCA in high school.”

That was at Ooltewah, where she graduated in 2000.

The 21-year-old Vradenburgh, one of seven sisters and one of six who run races, was the cross country runner of the year as a high school junior and the runner-up the next year. Two sisters ran the 5k Monday and won their age groups, as did their father in the 10k.

“I prefer the distance runs,” Karla said after her first FCA 10k. “It was pretty good. I haven’t really been training for runs. I just came out to have a good time.”

She said she started out “pretty fast,” but the race got “really rough” before the end.

“I started cramping up about mile five,” the Chattanooga Software Center employee said, “but I’ve faced worse.”

The 10k winners won gift cards from El Meson.

Miller, 38, more of an ultra trail runner – he ran the first Thunder Rock 100-miler, for example – was third in the FCA 10k last year. He moved up two places with Phillips and 2014 runner-up Andy Highlander switching back to the 5k (Highlander was fourth Monday) and joked that he “knew that if the fast guys picked the 5k I’d have a better chance,” but he had to hold off Ryan Heming and Troy Ketchum, who finished in 38:59 and 39:13.

Another mostly trail guy, Matt Sims, was the masters winner in 41:51.

“There are are a lot of good runners who haven’t won a race around here. It’s good to get that behind me,” said Miller, who has won a 5k and a 10k in West Tennessee.

He said he really likes the course making use of the Tennessee Riverwalk.

“It’s great seeing the other runners coming back at you, giving encouragement,” he said.

A Chattem project manager, he also promoted his company and Monday’s race beneficiary.

“We had a bunch good guys from Chattem running today, supporting the FCA organization,” Miller said.

“It was a great race with a lot of great crowd support,” said Ketchum, who’s 36.

Runner-up Heming, 31, was part of FCA while competing for Cleveland High School and Tennessee Wesleyan College and still goes back, he said, to speak to huddle groups “at the college level and middle school and high school levels,” he said.

“I’ve done the 10k every year they’ve had it here,” he said.

Contact Ron Bush at rbush@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6291.