Heat stops the Paul Short Run after Sloff and Cheruiyot win the Gold races
Lehigh cancelled six afternoon races in rising heat after Penn State's Nick Sloff and Pitt's Maureen Cheruiyot won the Gold races.
Photograph: Goodman Stadium on Lehigh's Goodman Campus, Bethlehem, where the Paul Short course runs, by Zeete, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia CommonsThe 52nd Paul Short Run got through its two Gold races on Friday morning and then stopped. With temperatures climbing through the late morning on Lehigh's Goodman Campus course in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, medical staff and the university's athletics administrators called off the six afternoon races, the College Brown, White and Green divisions for men and women. The two Open races and the two Gold races had already been run. The meet had drawn more than 7,000 athletes from over 600 schools across two days.
In the men's Gold 8K, Penn State junior Nick Sloff won in 23:59.8, his first win of the season, from Charleston's Matthew Meli (24:01.3) and Penn's Nicholas Mazzeo (24:03.1). The team race belonged to Wingate, the defending NCAA Division II champion and the top-ranked team in that division, which put five runners in the top 19 and scored 58 points. Penn State was second with 129, its best Paul Short finish since it won in 2001, and Pittsburgh third with 151 in a 35-team field.
In the women's Gold 6K, Pitt sophomore Maureen Cheruiyot ran a personal best of 19:47.7 to beat LSU's Edna Chepkemoi by four seconds. Chepkemoi's teammate Abigael Chemnagei was third in 20:13.0. Liberty, back at the meet after nine years away, won its first Paul Short title with 115 points, led by Allie Zealand in fourth. Penn and Yale tied on 144, with Penn taking second on the tiebreak, in a 37-team field.
A cancelled race on October 2 is the news here. The calendar says autumn; the course did not agree.
Sources: Lehigh Athletics; Lehigh Athletics; Leone Timing compiled results; Penn State Athletics; Liberty Athletics; The Brown and White.
