By Gavin Kentch
The 97th edition of Mount Marathon, the continent’s oldest mountain running race, was held on an impossibly steep mountain face overlooking Seward, Alaska, on Friday. Klaire Rhodes won the women’s race, for the second time in a row, on the 40th anniversary of the women first having a standalone race of their own in 1985. David Norris won the men’s race, for the sixth time in six starts; dude has never started this race and failed to win it.
I wrote about the women’s race soon after it ended; you can find that writeup here. I did not write about the men’s race, because I was off to a barbecue that started at precisely the same time, and then the holiday weekend got away from me between training and, especially, parenting. Sorry; nothing personal. Huge David Norris stan, I promise. You can read about the men’s race here (Alaska Sports Report), here (Anchorage Daily News; possibly paywalled), or here (Alaska’s News Source; not much of an article, but has video).
But enough words. Here are some photos!
All photos were taken by Anna Engel, for Nordic Insights. You can and should download and use and share them for free. Everyone likes race photos of themselves!
You should also consider chipping in a few bucks for Anna’s time (and for my web hosting, but mostly for her time). Anna worked a long day Thursday at her real job, then drove down to Seward either very late Thursday or early Friday. She was on the mountain for hours on Friday to photograph just about every athlete in the men’s and women’s races. She sorted through literally thousands of photos while car camping on the Kenai all weekend, somehow getting me a culled photo set before going back to work this morning. I have messages from Anna about photos sent at 10:43 p.m. last night and at 7:04 a.m. this morning, so she is clearly grinding here. And I’m paying her as much as I’m paying me, viz., $0.
So. You should tip her. You can find her Buy Me a Coffee here.
Financial support is voluntary but appreciated. Anna will probably put any money received toward buying a better camera, so she can take better photos of you next year, which I will then post here. Talk about a virtuous cycle.
Here are the top five men first, since I never wrote a race article on them (click on any photo in this article to bring up a slideshow):
Here are some other men (shoutout to “Hi Dad / Hi Mom” bicep guy in photo one; I hope this gets to you. Also, fun fact, if you zoom in on Michael Earnhart’s watch in one of the last photos here, you can see that his HR is 187 lol.)
And here are some of the women, starting with, well, Gumby:
You can find the full gallery here. I can’t promise that there is a photo of every single senior athlete in the field in this folder, but there just may be.
Again, photos here, Anna’s Buy Me a Coffee here. Please tag @nordicinsights on Instagram or Nordic Insights on Facebook if you use these shots on, as they say, the socials. Thanks, and congrats to all athletes.
