Molly Seidel wins the Bandera 50K outright in her first ultra
The Olympic marathon bronze medallist ran 4:09:39 on the rocky Texas Hill Country loops to beat every man in the field and set a women's course record.
Photograph: Molly Seidel in the senior women's race at the 2018 Great Edinburgh Cross Country, by Ian Robertson, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia CommonsMolly Seidel ran her first ultramarathon on Sunday and won it outright. The Tokyo Olympic marathon bronze medallist, now 31, covered the Bandera 50K in the Texas Hill Country outside San Antonio in 4:09:39, six minutes and ten seconds ahead of Benjamin Melisi, the first man. It was a women's course record. iRunFar put the old mark at 4:24 by Melanie Fryar in 2012, with the note that the course has changed over the years.
Bandera is not a soft place to start. The 50K is a technical loop at about 1,000 metres in the hills west of San Antonio, and the 100K had run the day before on the same ground. Courtney Rouse was second woman in 4:36:12 and Nepal's Mira Rai third in 4:46:20. Collin Bohne and Landon King followed Melisi in the men's race.
On Saturday, Jared Rothlauf won the 100K in 8 hours 54 minutes, more than an hour clear of the next finisher. Anneke Durkan took the women's 100K in 11 hours 8 minutes.
Athletics Illustrated reported Seidel is moving her career to ultrarunning, with Bandera a first step. Not a soft opening: one of the fastest road marathoners America has produced went to a rock garden in January and ran the field, men included, off its feet.
Sources: iRunFar; Athletics Illustrated.
