Run Gloucester!, the 7-miler that will be held for the first time Sunday morning, will be the third leg of what organizer Dave McGillivray hopes will be a seaside trifecta along with Falmouth and the Beach to Beacon in Cape Elizabeth, Me. The race, which will follow a loop layout, will start and finish at the famed fisherman’s memorial statue . . . Thirty-five years after he won the classic confrontation with confrere Bill Rodgers that put the race on the global map, Frank Shorter ran what he called a PBNH (“personal best with a new hip’’) yesterday. “At least I didn’t double my time,’’ declared the 62-year-old former Olympic marathon champion, who had a hip resurfaced eight months ago. “It was nice and aerobic. I talked to everyone going by me. I said, ‘I don’t care if you go by me as long as you tell me I look good.’ ’’ Rodgers, who was Shorter’s teammate in the 1976 Montreal Games and who won here three times, had a sprightly but prudent outing to avoid aggravating “a foot thing’’ and was 16th in his age group.
Joan Benoit Samuelson, who was the second masters woman behind Colleen De Reuck, is tuning up for a 25th anniversary run in Chicago, where she posted the best marathon time of her career (2:21:21) in 1985, an American record that stood for 18 years and still is the third-fastest ever. The 53-year-old Samuelson, who won here six times between 1976 and 1985, still owns five of the top 11 marathon marks among US women . . . Though the weather was sunny and ominously warm an hour before the 10 a.m. start, it was agreeably cooler and cloudier during the race with a modest crosswind off the water. “This is what I call no-excuses weather,’’ said Shorter. It was markedly different from the conditions for the inaugural 1973 sloshfest. “A baby monsoon with 45 mile-an-hour winds,’’ recalled race founder (and birthday boy) Tommy Leonard, who was at his customary post near the Woods Hole drawbridge before the race and covered the course in style with car and driver . . . Ten years after he won his last wheelchair race here, Craig Blanchette came back to claim his eighth crown. “I got bored,’’ confessed the 42-year-old Blanchette, who came out of retirement to win by a minute. He didn’t need to consult a map to refresh his memory of the topography. “It came back real quick,’’ said Blanchette, who’d won the Beach to Beacon title the previous weekend. “I love the first 3 miles of this course. It’s a dream.’’ Winning the women’s wheelchair race for the fifth time since 2002 was Jessica Galli.
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