Jenn Stocks repeats as the Chattanooga Chase 8k women's winner and is a 1-mile runner-up.Also read...
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Seth Ruhling doubled up at the Chattanooga Chase on Monday, winning both the 8-kilometer race and the later 1-miler.
His times were 27 minutes, 29 seconds and 4 minutes, 53 seconds.
Jenn Stocks doubled up in a different way, as the 8k women's winner for the second year in a row. She then finished second to Emily Bell in the much flatter mile race.
"I just ran the 1-mile and Jenn already ran the 8k. I had an advantage," said Bell, a 34-year-old exercise physiologist and certified health coach who has a 2-year-old daughter to keep her busy also.
She was sixth overall in 5:23 in her first road race of the year. She's a competitive cyclist also.
"I've been on the bike a lot," Bell said. "I just wanted to get a good time trial in today."
Having grown up in Maryville, she moved to the Chattanooga area less than three years ago with her husband Tim, a former University of Tennessee high jumper who's also a bike rider.
The 1-mile overall runner-up is an even more recent transplant. Will Harper, who finished five seconds behind Ruhling, is a former Sewanee runner from northern Virginia who went to Mexico City after his 2007 graduation, met the woman who became his wife while going to business school in Chicago and spent a year in Boston before moving to Lookout Mountain three months ago.
He had run against some of Monday's top contenders in the King of the Mountain race on Lookout and in the Chattanooga Half Marathon and is looking forward to continued local competition.
So is Stocks, even though she and her husband, Lucas, moved last week to Dallas, Ga., where she is about to start a new job. They have become regulars among the top finishers in area races while Jenn, a 25-year-old Berry College graduate, has been in the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga's physical therapy program.
"We will come back. We like the races up here," she said.
The move limited her training last week and she felt it in the humidity of Monday's races, she admitted while cooling down from the 8k, in which she was 31st overall in 33:43. Jan Gautier, 50, was the women's runner-up in 34:42.
"It was rough," Stocks said of the hilly main race. "I was going to try to go out conservatively. I know how I've been feeling, and I just wanted to make it up (the long grade of) Minnekahda. But then I had to go down it."
She wasn't so conservative, though, in fulfilling her professed main goal. That was to win the prize Rock/Creek was offering the first female as well as the first male to reach the crest of the signature hill.
Ruhling was the "King of Minnekahda" and really was not challenged for the 8k win. Geno Phillips and John "Spider" Sillery, both 44, were second and third in 28:15 and 28:32 for the 4.97 miles, and 15-year-old Adam Rodriguez was three seconds behind Sillery.
Phillips had run a 10k in Calhoun, Ga., last week for his first competition since the Joe Johnson Run in early October. He had taken a break to recover from a group of physical conditions including tendinitis, hamstring issues and a slight tear in his hip labrum.
"This race is so tough. It's got as much downhill as uphill, and that beats you up, but I'm glad to be back," the Red Bank Middle School teacher and coach said. "I was in eighth or ninth place going up Minnekahda, and I caught everybody but Seth. Then I had to hold off Spider on the downhill."
Ruhling, a 21-year-old Southern Adventist University student, won the Karen Lawrence Run on the last day of 2014 but had not run the Chase since "like six years ago," he said, noting that he was persuaded to enter by race director Alan Outlaw.
"All the press and marketing they did for this race was phenomenal. It has a grass-roots feel," Ruhling said. "This race brings it back to what road running is all about. The course is so hard. I thought I was going to collapse at the top of Minnekahda. I ran like 5:15s (paces) the first two miles, and the third mile was like 6:30.
"And guys like Sillery and Geno - they're still killing it. I've raced against them before, and you never can underestimate them."
He said he came to win but didn't have a specific time goal, since it had been so long since he had raced the Chase. Following his 1-mile victory, he added that "after the 8k, I thought I had a good chance to win this one, too. I thought there wouldn't be anybody coming just for the mile, but I was wrong. When I saw some of the other guys lining up, I knew it would be a tough race."
Contact Ron Bush at rbush@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6291.