Thompson, Marlier win Missionary Ridge race
Christian Thompson and Jessica Marlier again lived up to the name of their employer Saturday morning.
The two Fleet Feet Sports representatives were the overall winners of the 45th annual Missionary Ridge Road Race. Thompson threatened the 31-year-old race record of 23 minutes, 7 seconds by finishing the hilly 4.7-mile course in 23:41 — more than three minutes ahead of second-place Kevin Huwe.
Marlier was the women’s winner and sixth overall in 29:03. She was the women’s winner also in 2014 but moved away for a while and was running the Ridge race for the first time since then.
It was the first ever for Thompson, who moved to Chattanooga in June 2016 but skipped last year’s Ridge event because it was on his first wedding anniversary.
Thompson, who turned 29 last month, has won all but one area race he has entered — at distances ranging from a marathon to two miles. The exception was a third-place finish in the 2016 Magnum Mile, the 2017 version of which is set for Aug. 26.
He said he was told ahead of time about Adam Pinkston’s 1986 Ridge record but didn’t press to beat it in the high humidity.
“I thought if I could break 24 (minutes), that’d be a great day,” said Thompson, who grew up in the Finger Lakes region of New York, ran for the University of Colorado and lived in Winston-Salem, N.C., before moving to Chattanooga.
“It was hard, but I enjoyed it. Yes, it was hot and humid, but if you live in Chattanooga you can’t complain about that — you get that all the time. I was very happy with how I ran today.”
He just began marathon training, so he used Saturday’s race as part of his weekly workout regimen.
“And it’s nice to run some of these classic races,” he said.
Marlier, 31, already had started marathon training — directed from afar by her former high school coach in Florida — so her Saturday workout couldn’t end, she said he told her, until she did two more miles after the race, “at about 85-90 percent.”
“I cracked 28 (27:56) when I won here in 2014,” she said, “but today I was just trying to beat 30, and I was able to do that.” By almost a full minute.
“My big theme for the summer is running myself back into top shape, and races are more fun than running around in circles on a track,” Marlier said. “I feel like I pushed it pretty well. I was happy with it. I didn’t look at my watch at all. I was trying to focus on recovering on the downhills. Luckily there are as many downhills as uphills.”
One guy told her she “ran like a possessed bat.”
Huwe finished in 26:44, and Andy Highlander was third in 27:39. Dean Thompson (28:27) and Ryan McGinnis (28:59) were fourth and fifth, and Tripp McCallie was three seconds behind Marlier in taking seventh.
Mary Ballinger, a UT-Martin assistant running coach, was the female runner-up and ninth overall in 30:24, and Jennifer Huwe was the third-place woman and 16th overall in 32:20.
The Arnold Godwin Award honoring a longtime Missionary Ridge race participant went to 81-year-old Wes Rehberg of Chattanooga as the oldest finisher. He was 191st out of 198.