It was a good morning on the trails Saturday to be a former, and current, student at NAU.
First, down the mountain a bit at the Sedona Stumble 10K and 5K, NAU senior Bronson Fiore, 23 and majoring in construction management, won the Sedona Stumble 10K with a time of 41 minutes 6 seconds — an impressive 6:37 pace on a technical course.
Then, farther down the mountain, former NAU cross country runner Ryan Raff, now embarking on a trail ultra career, won the Crown King Scramble, a 50K point-to-point uphill the whole way, in 3:41:24, four minutes ahead of noted ultra coach David Roche (he trains Allie Ostrander).
Two other former NAU runners, Makai Clemons (3:52:14) and Joey DeFeo (3:56:11) finished third and fourth, respectively, at Crown King. (Pro ultra runner and doctor Megan Roche, David’s wife, was the women’s winner at Crown King and ninth overall at 4:30:17.)
Raff and David Roche were running neck-and-neck at the 22.3-mile checkpoint, the aptly-named Fort Misery, but Raff opened up a two-minute lead by the Summit aid station (28.6 miles) and covered the last three miles at sub-6 pace.
Back up in Sedona, Fiore beat out Flagstaff’s Ryan Guldan by slightly less than a minute. Guldan is in the midst of Boston Marathon training. The women’s winner was Flagstaff’s Valerie Cross, running an impressive 50:39, with her second three-mile loop only 13 seconds slower than the first. Cross, 42, pretty much wins every masters division in local community races.
In the Sedona 5K, Sedona’s Cody McKesson, 25, easily took the victory in 18:59, the only runner to break 20 minutes. Flagstaff’s Samuel Simmons finished third. The women’s winner was Jody Zegestowsky, 41, of Huntingdon Valley, PA., in 25:13.
Fiore, the Sedona 10K winner, has an interesting story. He was never a competitive runner in school — he played hockey in Colorado — but decided to take up long-distance running to honor his mother, a former pro cyclist, who died of cancer.
“I’ve only been (running) for about a year,” Fiore said. “My mother was a world-champion cyclist and she died two years ago from cancer. When all that was going on, I was kind of not doing the things I wanted to do with my life. I knew I had this naturally-given athletic ability, and I really wanted to go out and start competing again …
“I started running just to get in my own head and get some stress out. Then, I realized I kind of enjoyed this and signed up for a 40K. I got fourth place, so I thought, ‘OK, if I start training, what could happen?’”
Asked about the Sedona Stumble course, which is short in duration but long on technical challenges, Fiore said “it’s tough on the legs. Those mounds on the course are killer. I’d take a few choppy steps up, thgen try to slow yourself on down. It kills your quads. I was feeling it by the end, for sure.”
Fiore is training for his first 100-mile race, the Devil’s Gulch 100 in Wenatchee, Wash., in July.
“But I’ve been doing 50Ks and 100Ks, trying to bump my way up in the ultra-marathon distance,” he said.
Last October, Fiore finished third in the Sky Peaks 50 Miler on Flagstaff’s San Francisco Peaks. More recently, he placed fourth on March 3 in the Mountain to Fountain 15K in the Valley.
Complete Sedona Stumble results can be found here.
All told, there were 306 entrants in the Sedona Stumble, organized by Run Flagstaff and Run Sedona. One fashion note: Of all 306 competitors, this guy below in the Cookie Monster shorts was the most stylish.
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