Sacramento Running News

The sun is out, the trees are blooming, the birds are chirping, and there is a buzz of excitement around here as 6,000 runners prepare to take on a couple of the area’s largest events.

Tony Lafferty and Rory Bosio take a break from volunteering at registration to check out a map of the new WTC course.

This year’s  Way Too Cool 50K will be run on what is anticipated to be a faster, new course featuring around 1,000 feet less climbing and no more two-way traffic.  (Sorry folks, it’s still 50Km.)

With nearly 700 registered runners, this will easily be one of the largest trail ultras in the country, and the

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John Blue finishing up his pacing of the 2008 Cowtown Marathon

If you are planning to run the Urban Cow Half Marathon this year, you should know the fees go up on September 27th.

In case you’ve been living under a rock or somewhere far outside the Sacramento Metroplex, Urban Cow is the new name for the race that had been known as the Cowtown Half.

The owners of the other Cowtown Marathon got pissy with our race just being generally better, if for no other reason than our race is in Sacramento and not Fort Worth.

Lawyers, or the threat of lawyers, got involved and suddenly it is the Urban Cow Half Marathon. You can read the story behind all the name changes right here on the event’s history page.

If you were maybe sitting on the fence, and were trying to decide whether or not you had the fortitude to run this thing somewhere in the neighborhood of 1:40, you can join me, John Blue, as I lead this epic pace group.

There will be other pacers there, and maybe their pace is more what you were looking for, but I guarantee you that I will make many dumb jokes and do my best to get you in by 1:40.

Lets say you’ve been training for the California International Marathon and it’s still months away. December 5th seems like a distant country. No need to worry about signing up yet, right?

Unfortunately, that is probably not a good idea this year. Like many races, CIM’s registration is way ahead of prior years’, and they are reporting three times the number of registrations compared to this time last year. You might not want to put it off. They’ve passed 5,000 already and are capped at 7,500.

It’s not even August and now you need to make that critical decision: Register for the marathon now (before August 1st) and Pay $80, or wait until you’re sure you’ll be running and pay $100.  Relay team prices go up from $100 to $160.  You may as well bite the bullet and register now since registration closes for sure by November 1st, and they are on track to sell out in advance of that date.

It seems like just a couple of years ago, registering at the Expo was still an option!  Get the details at the California International Marathon website.