Champ defends title in Mile run
McNamara wins pro men’s event in 3:58.50
Running under a blue moon, the only colors that mattered to Jordan McNamara were the purple and yellow ribbons pinned to the left breast of his forest-green tank top.
The night before he was set to run in the GNC Live Well Liberty Mile, his family informed him that his 90-year-old grandmother had suffered a stroke two weeks earlier. When McNamara spoke with her before the race, he asked her what her favorite colors were; she told him purple and yellow. So as he ran down Penn and Liberty Avenues, he made sure a small part of her was with him.
In a race that he said could have made or broken his season, those ribbons gave him just the boost he needed as he repeated as the Liberty Mile men’s champion Friday night with a time of 3 minutes, 58.50 seconds.
“Coming in, I knew people were fit and ready to go and I was a little bit of a question mark,” McNamara said. “For that question mark to be erased in the last 100 meters, you don’t get many moments like that in your life. ”
McNamara finished 0.43 seconds ahead of secondplace finisher Mac Fleet, McNamara’s teammate with Nike OTC Elite, while Jack Bolas came in third.
Though little separated himself and Fleet, McNamara said he knew he would win with about 400 meters left. In a race format accustomed to intense finishes with string-thin margins of victory, he even had time to point to the cheering sections that flanked the left and right sides of Liberty Avenue in the final 20 yards while flashing a grin.
“I’ve had a hard season, a lot of ups and downs, and I haven’t been able to show the form that I had last year,” McNamara said. “I had workouts that were very much indicative of this performance, but when it came down to race day, I just really haven’t had the legs that I needed, whether it was due to travel or psyching myself out or bad luck. I’ve been working for months and months waiting for it to come to form and tonight it did.”
On the women’s side, another familiar name topped the finish list, as Heather Kampf captured her third Liberty Mile victory in the past four years. Her time of 4:32.59 placed her comfortably ahead of last year’s champion, Gabriele Grunewald, who finished more than a full second behind.
After being edged out a year ago by Grunewald, Kampf was determined to hold on to her first-place position as the race neared its final moments.
“The plan was essentially to match strides with whoever was leading the race on the home stretch,” said Kampf, who is the event record holder. “When it came to that point where I thought I could go, I had to go hard and never look back and just hope.”
About 1,500 people participated in the event, setting a record.
In the “unstoppable wave” of runners that preceded McNamara and Kampf’s races, Clara Santucci, the 2015 Pittsburgh Marathon champion and Greene County resident, finished first in her heat with a time of 4:56 in what she said was her first mile race in about five years.