GBTC XC Invitational - Wellesley

This race, hosted by GBTC, changed venues from Topsfield's Bradley Palmer State Park to Wellesley's Elm Bank Park. This place was a decent venue and can see it getting bigger in the future. I drove down and signed up before the race. Parking was about a half mile from the start and finish. All races were delayed by 20-25 minutes from clogged registration for the youth race (from what I heard). I was happy to see Adam Malek and Mike Quintal warming up while I was checking it out with some HFC Striders. Too bad CMS could not score a team of five. Anyhow, the course was a mix of grass fields, double path trails, and wide trail along the Charles River with some areas that required careful foot placement around roots. My Inov8 flats handled all terrain nicely within the 3 loop course. I got out of the start without any harm. The race was single file within 400m. I pushed hard to keep Jason Cakouras (HFC) close after the mile. He was really the only guy that was in my radius from then to the finish the I recognized. I had a flat spot after 3 miles but regained some momentum on the last loop cutting through the rooted trail section. A WMDP guy who turned out to be former CMS runner, Jesse Regnier, blew by with 1000m to go. I was keeping Jason close and knew he had a teamate, Lee Danforth, right behind. I never caught Jason but I did get run down in the last 50m by Lee. I finished right in the middle of the race (23rd out of 47) and scored a decent 8K time of 27:26. Any day in the 27's is a good day. I recall just two small hills up to a soccer field during the course. Other than that, this is a fast and flat xc course that I intend to hit up in the future. Adam finished 3rd overall with a blistering 25:17 while Mike had some issues, but still ran 27 flat.

My splits were as follows on my watch.

5:16
5:30    10:46
5:40    16:26
5:27    21:53
5:33    27:27 - 27:26 per AB-MAC timing

Full results