March

Madness

Join the fun and test your speed and turnover in some friendly competition this March! Inspired by the Trials of Miles - Chase the Throne competition happening in January in the bigger cities, we made our own brackets competition in and around Amherst: March Madness - Chase the Cupcake. We have selected a fun mix of segments, for the 4 rounds (see below). Hopefully, we gather enough interest to fill a full bracket (minimum of 16 runners). We plan to randomize the seeding, so you might get unlucky with meeting the eventual winner in the first round. But keep in mind that not everyone might be racing all out and might be doing these segments as part of a midweek workout, so you may surprise yourself with how far you get. One can run the segment for the week on any day, alone, in groups, or with a pack of pacers. You're also free to run a next round segment, even if you're technically already eliminated. The eventual winner will be awarded a grand prize in the form of a cupcake from our friends at The Humble Peach.

To accommodate both road and trail runners we selected segments that are runnable, not technical, but they're not all pancake flat.

We hope you're interested to spice up your March training and join us! Sign up here or send an email to tumarunning @ gmail.com

With an epic battle up Skinner State Park Road, March Madness has come to an end.

Fun was had, miles were covered, feet were climbed and cupcakes were eaten.

Unfortunately Adam's legs made him choose scientific progress over personal glory, so it was down to Brian and Dan.
Jake, Adam, Wouter and Matt P had come out to witness the grand finale show down, and Brian had brought additional support from Kim and Lydia, if I'm not mistaken and that's how one would spell that.

The spectators started heading up the road early to catch the runners halfway and at the finish, so nobody knows what happened in the first few minutes of the race, but once the runners came around the corner near Halfway House, Brian was in the lead. But there was still a long way to go, and Dan is generally not known best for his short distance road racing. But once we saw the runners near the finish, Brian had increased his lead ever so slightly, winning this year's version of March Madness with a 11:07 finish on the final segment! Dan got second in 11:30.

After the runners and fans enjoyed the sun and shared stories at the finish line near Summit House, the The Humble Peach cupcakes were awarded at the base of the road. Adam was awarded for making the final. Spectators got awarded with chocolate chip cookies for making it to the summit as well.

People seemed to have enjoyed this time-trial / segment chasing series, so we're planning to continue the tradition in 2024. Let us know your thoughts on what you would like to see next year and how we can grow.

Thanks to Jake and Matt for the pictures!

A lot of buzz at the starting line

Still haven't Chase'd down the person who has been posting the signs

Brian took an early lead

And maintained it

Dan trying to close the gap

Brian in the lead before the final turn

The Humble Peach cupcakes

3rd place: Adam

Dan receiving his 2nd place cupcake

Dan being happy with his 2nd place cupcake

Dan eating his 2nd place cupcake

March Madness - Chase the Cupcake 2023 Winner: Brian Krusell

Madness, 2 half finalists didn't make it out there this week! Still their challengers didn't go easy at all. In the L-bracket we had an actual battle. Dan was the first to make it out to the segment and set impressive time (7:56), taking almost a minute of the historically fastest time. L. Smith wasn't just going to let Dan get away with it. He put in a solid time (8:30) but Dan's time stayed out of reach. Next, Brian, with company of Alex, took a shot at Dan's time. He got within 7 seconds (8:03) which was more than enough to beat Jake who seemed to have reinjured himself with all this madness. Later in the day Adam went for it. Probably worried about Jonathan's road speed Adam went deep, dipping just 1 second under Dan's time! Since Jonathan didn't make it out to the segment this week, we have our final 3: Brian, Dan and Adam. Brian beat Dan in the flat first round, but the final is a serious climb! This could be anyone's game next week. I'll try to get the 3 musketeers to go head to head for this final. If we manage to find a time and date, everyone is invited to cheer them on (or challenge them).

"That first climb was tough"

Week 2 brought some challenges! Big snowstorm on Tuesday, people out of town for spring break, people racing on Saturday or Sunday.
But we also had support! Still wondering who put up the sign though...
11 runners went for it, some even more than once. Most people ran a slightly faster time on this segment than last week, but not everyone likes climbing. For round 3 it's down to the final four, and 2 still standing in the L-bracket.

We had an exciting first week! For most of the week there was ice near the end of the segment, but after Steve cleared a path, several folks went back for a second attempt!

Some accidentally ran the “Up the hill to Amherst” segment, not the full "March Madness 2023 Round 1" segment which might be related to Strava autohiding our segment… Luckily their splits on that segment made for a clear story. We also had a nice GPS glitch where someone ran through the finish, took a break, ran back into the segment, and Strava deciding to go with that. But with the “compare efforts” that was easily resolved.

Double check all your privacy settings on your activity including any start and end radius privacy radius, there have been at least 3 runs that initially didn't show up in the leader board, most of those were resolved before 7pm. One led to an edit. But I can see that Steve wouldn't mind taking the L-bracket, rather than go against Brian.

For the upcoming week, we have a nice dirt road climb, although it might be muddy later in the week…
This week we had Dan with the 4th fastest time being eliminated, next week either the 2nd or 3rd fastest time of round 1 will be eliminated... this is Madness!!

Let's go!

I made the brackets for 20 runners, adding a third runner for the bracket 2, 4, 6 and 8. Then I asked chatGPT to put our names in random order and used that to populate the brackets.

I checked this week's segment while driving by, and at least the first half mile was free of snow and ice as of Sunday afternoon. Hopefully, that's also true for the part I couldn't see from my car.

The winner of each bracket progresses, the non-winners will have a second chance to make it to the final through the "repechage" bracket, which will be more competitive (i.e., more runners per bracket). So everyone will be able to compete in round 2.

The final round will have 3 runners. But feel free to run the segments of round 3 and 4 if you are eliminated by then.

Have fun out there!

Round 1
3/6 - 3/12
Rail Trail

Round 2
3/13 - 3/19
Sand Hill Rd

Round 3
3/20 - 3/26
Flat Hills Rd

Round 4
3/27 - 4/2
Skinner

Rules:
1) This is a free, friendly competition. Keep things fair, keep things fun!
2) The window to set a time closes each Sunday at 7:00pm. Make sure you have uploaded your run, and made it public at that time.
3) You're allowed to do multiple attempts during the week.
4) We will mainly use the Strava leaderboards for the segments posted.
5) Sunday at 7pm, the person with the fastest time in each match-up advance, the other(s) is/are eliminated.
6) Eliminated runners can still run the segment in the next round, but are out of the competition.
7) We're currently planning to pool everyone together in the open division bracket, if we end up with a lot of interest we will consider adding a separate women's bracket (or a separate Matts' bracket).
8) You can opt to keep your time secret until Sunday 7:00pm, if you're worried that your direct competitors will target your time. (Just play nice and don't publicly post a slow time early in the week, and privately set a faster time, to confuse your direct competitors). Make sure to make it public in time though (Sundays at 7:00pm).
9) If you don't have Strava, you can submit a link with your GPS platform, and we can see if we can extract a time. Best let us know ahead of time if you want to join, but don't have Strava. If for some reason you feel that Strava didn't properly record your time for the segment, let us know as well. We'll find a solution.
10) This is a free, friendly competition. Keep things fair, keep things fun!

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