Performance Jetty-2-Jetty Ultramarathon & Team Relay Results

Performance Jetty-2-Jetty Ultramarathon & Team Relay - Saturday, 3/22/08

The World's Longest Beach Run - 35 Miles on the Beach from Atlantic Beach south to the Jetty at the St Augustine Inlet. Weather was cool and overcast, with a slight wind that came from the south by the end of the race. The conditions at the start were better than usual, though the race began near high tide. The J2J race started at 9:00am, close to high tide, yet the surface was relatively flat even from the beginning. While beach surface conditions were improving during the day, the beach, as always, provided varying challenges throughout the race. As is normal, winter storms had changed portions of the beach, leaving some flatter than usual and some with more cocina shells. Runners reported seeing many starfish, conch shells, sand dollars, and other unusual sea creatures all along the course. In some areas, erosion had eaten away at the dunes near some homes, leaving small "cliffs" from the water to the houses above. 

In this third year that included relay teams, runners on teams won the first five finishing positions, showing the strength of teamwork in this long distance race. Times for many teams and individual runners showed faster times in 2008, in spite of the slight headwind. Team Tenacious Turtles improved their own finish time by a whopping 12 minutes!  After leading for much of the first half of the race, Team Tenacious Turtles was passed by Team Brew Crew, who headed to a first place finish in 4:20:25, an improvement of about 10 minutes over last year's first finishers. Running steadily from start to finish, Chris Maples was the first solo runner to finish, in a time of 5:31:37 -- once again, a finish almost 10 minutes faster than last year's 5:40:10 solo first place. Lorna Brown was the first solo woman runner to finish, and was also third solo overall in a time of 6:11:10, followed by Loretta Haycook in 6:21:20, which is almost 10 minutes better than her fastest previous J2J.

For the first time, a BIKE Division was added to J2J, with three cyclists at the starting line. This year, the 35 miles of beach was so challenging on a bike that one of the cyclists decided to drop out at about the halfway point at Mickler's Landing. Even by the first checkpoint, some of the Teams were ahead of some of the bikes in the cyclo-cross type conditions, in which the riders spent some of their time pushing their bikes when they encountered soft sections on the beach. At other times, they were rolling well, especially as the tide was getting lower throughout the day. After a challenging day in and out of the saddle, the Bike Division was won by Andy Stenson, by about 20 minutes over his teammate, Clark Schaffer, who announced that he was already planning to return to take on the Jetty-2-Jetty Ultra in 2009.