It was a good day for Cougars fans Saturday on Brown's Island, as the XTERRA East Championship weekend kicked off with 10K and 21K trail runs.
That's Cougars, as in the Brigham Young University Cougars.
Jacob Gustafsson, 27, dusted the men's field in the Fugitive 10K with a time of 36:16, and Ryan Witt, 25, pulled away in the final half-mile to win the 21K in 1:29:39. Both ran cross country and track at BYU.
Witt, a Midlothian native competing in his first half-marathon, said he knew of Gustafsson when he attended BYU, but the 10K champ "was on his mission while I was there.
"I knew his brother (Peter) better. They called him 'The Swede.' "
Gustafsson, who bested second-place finished Brian Carnes (39:13) by nearly three minutes, was a mile and half-mile specialist at BYU. This kind of trail challenge was a new experience for him.
"It was so much harder than I thought," the McLean resident said. "The Mayan steps (aka the Manchester Climbing Wall), I just walked up that. I was like, 'I'm not running up that.' Those steps take it out of you."
Despite living in the area, Witt said he had never run the course. An assistant manager at Runner Bill's in Midlothian, he does his trail running in Pocahontas State Park.
"I've never been in an event like this. I had a great time," he said. "I had heard great things about it coming in, and it lived up to the expectations."
On the women's side, Sarah Breevoort broke through for victory in the 21K race after finishing second the past two years. The 25-year-old MD/PhD student at the University of Virginia ran 1:33:10, comfortably defeating Meghan Gebke (1:41:56).
Unlike Witt and Gustafsson, Breevoort wasn't a college runner, but she got into triathlons while at the University of Georgia and came to Richmond to race in the National Duathlon Festival two years ago.
"It's a great venue," she said. "There's just something so organic about running trails, I think. You've got to embrace the hills."
Breevoort was the only one of the winners to have run the course before. Jenn Ennis, 23, ran track and cross country at the University of Richmond before graduating last week, but she had never run on the infamous James River Park System trails. She won the 10K in 44:09.
"It was tough, a lot tougher than I anticipated," she said. "But the trails and the rock jumping, it definitely made the time go by faster. I loved the rocks. That was my favorite part, just leaping over them."
Ennis and Breevoort saw more of the men's leaders than they did other women. Both built early leads and cruised to victory.
Despite the impressive runs by those at the front of the pack, the most remarkable feat of the day belonged to five guys in gas masks who finished near the back.
Richmonder Jeremy Soles, an Iraq War veteran, led his Team X-TREME to a 2:35:51 finish in the 21K run. After the race, a representative from the Guinness Book of World Records presented the group with the record for "The Fastest Cross Country 21K Team Run While Wearing Gas Masks."
Soles promptly handed the award to Staff Sergeant Ryan Major, another Iraq War veteran, who lost both his legs and suffered other injuries when an IED exploded near him.
Earlier Saturday morning, Team X-TREME arranged for Major to parachute onto Brown's Island with the U.S. Army's Golden Knights, something Major said was a dream of his.
"It's an honor for you guys to be honoring me," Major said upon receiving the Guinness record.
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