2012 St. George Marathon!! Great performances.

[Mike Schramm]

Great St. George Marathon on the Oct 6 2012.  Perfect Weather.  Congrats to the 2012 Champions, Fritz Van de Kamp and Amber Green.
 
Here are some other amazing performances:
 
*Iain Hunter, who finished 2nd behind Fritz, ran the FASTEST time ever by a Masters Runner in St. George, beating the legendary Stephen Lester's time in 1986.   Iain ran 2:22:16 which beat Stephen's time of 2:22:52.  This record lasted 26 years, and was the target for so many years by Jerry Henley.
 
*Not only is Amber Green the 2012 champion, she is also the first Female from Washington County to win the race.  She also lowered her previous record for fastest Washington County time from 2:48:36 to 2:43:00.   Great performance.  Also, the 27th fastest in history and fastest female time in 5 years!
 
*Julie Thomas becomes the 3rd female to win both an Overall title (in 2009) and now a Masters title.  She joins Brenda Graham Gray and Suzanne Morris.   Julie also now has SEVEN top 5 finishes, which is only exceeded by the great Cheryl Harper.
 
*Even though Pepi Peterson is probably disappointed in not winning the Masters title for the 5th time, his time of 2:23:29 was amazing.  Not only was it his fastest personal time in St. George, it was the 4th fastest Masters time in history, after Stephen Lester, Iain Hunter and Jerry Henley.   Pepi also finished in the top 5 for the fifth straight year.


*Alydia Barton now has 11 performances in the top 1,000 times, only exceeded by two other runners.

Congrats to all Finishers!

[Burt McCumber]

Love it!

[Sasha Pachev]

Last time I checked Julie Thomas had 6 children. Amber has three (unless she secretly added one while I was not counting). Lindsey Dunkley has three. Over the years, and this year in particular, we have seen mothers dominate the podium in local marathons and half marathons. I find this quite significant. Pregnancy alone puts you at a competitive disadvantage. Having a baby to take care of only adds to that, and that baby takes some time to become somewhat self-sufficient. Then another one comes, and more.

How does this work? It is not like all women in Utah are mothers. From the demographic point of view if we look at the active LDS group where you would expect to find the highest concentration of mothers we would observe that even in that group we have a high number of women who do not have children.  We have heavily populated singles wards in the Church, and in the family wards there are are plenty of single young women and couples that do not have children. Outside of the Church the percentage of women without children is even higher. You would expect that the distribution of talent is the same in all groups. Having a small but significant population with even a relatively small competitive advantage will result in domination - as an example consider how East Africa dominates the distance running in spite of the fact that the population of East Africa is much smaller than let's say China. So with that in mind you would expect a woman without children who on average is younger, does not yet have as many responsibilities, does not have to think how she is going to handle a crying baby in the middle of the night when she needs to recover after a grueling workout, and has not yet experienced the fallout of multiple pregnancies to be like an East African against Chinese even if we assumed that there are as many mothers for a woman without children in Utah as there are Chinese for an East African (Kenyan, Ethiopian, Eritrian, or Ugandan), which is by far not the case. 

So given the above, how in the world do mothers manage to not only be somewhat competitive, but to dominate? I have some ideas, but I will let the mothers speak for themselves.