🔒Beach to Beacon racers battle hills, humidity for Dirigo Reads

Gordon Campbell said his days of running 10K races are over, but the retiree was glad to lend a hand as a volunteer at Saturday’s TD Beach to Beacon in Cape Elizabeth. “It’s the absolute most amount of fun that you can have,” Campbell said next to a table stacked with decorative aluminum cans of Poland Spring water. "The people here are fantastic." The Harrison resident said he left home at 4 a.m. to be there in time.

"The spirit that you have here, it's infectious," said Campbell, the former chief procurement officer at Brinks Co., the cash-handling company known for its armored vehicles. "I wish it would spill over." More than 7,000 runners took part in the 28th edition of the annual event, which raised $75,000 for Dirigo Reads, a Bangor-based children’s literacy nonprofit. Around 800 volunteers performed duties from directing traffic to collecting trash. The 6.2-mile race starts near Crescent Beach and ends in Fort Williams Park at the foot of Maine’s most photographed lighthouse. The course is curvy and hilly, especially the last mile. Along the route, spectators banged drums, rang cow bells and aimed lawn sprinklers at the overheating runners on a humid morning. The crowd at the finish line was just as boisterous, easily drowning out “Night Fever” and other tunes blaring from the PA system.

Spectators included Sean Doody, a New Hampshire resident with a house on Long Island in Casco Bay. Standing near the finish line in a “Jaws” T-shirt, Doody said he came to support his daughter, a former Division I runner at the University of New Hampshire. His take as a first-timer at Beach to Beacon: “Pretty cool, pretty nice finish,” he said.

Para athletes finish first

Wheelchair athletes tackled the course first, led by first-place finisher Miguel Jimenez-Vergara of suburban San Diego. “I’ve never done this course before,” the 26-year-old said after completing the race in 22:36. “Going in blind was really tough, especially just not knowing the angles at which to take turns,” he said. “The last little bit gets narrow and on wheels when you’re trying to hold and maintain speed, it’s very tricky, but I thought it was a really cool course.”  

This year’s race featured the largest-ever field of para athletes in Beach to Beacon history, including 13 in the wheelchair division. They were joined by three two-person teams, each pairing an able-bodied runner pushing a non-ambulatory participant. “I’d love to see this race get a little bigger for us in terms of invitation size, prize money, coverage and everything,” Jimenez-Vergara said. Hoda Elshorbagy, a 36-year-old Egyptian athlete from the University of Illinois who found the hills to be a “good challenge,” was the women’s wheelchair victor at 26:25. Heartened by this year's record turnout of para athletes, she said, “it helps to grow the sport even better.”

Among elite athletes, Habtom Samuel of Eritrea won the men’s race in 27:40 and Pamela Kosgei of Kenya crossed the tape in 31:51 to take the women's title.

‘Significant donation’

The annual event dates back to 1998, when the race was founded as the Peoples Beach to Beacon by Olympic gold medalist and Cape Elizabeth native Joan Benoit Samuelson to benefit children’s charities in Maine. Dirigo Reads, this year’s beneficiary, was represented by board members and volunteers. “This has been a truly significant donation to us, and it’s going to help fund the entire next year’s worth of programming,” Elizabeth Sutherland, board vice chair of Dirigo Reads as well as president and CEO of Bangor-based marketing firm Sutherland Weston, said before taking her place at the finish line to hold the tape for the first female finisher. Sutherland and other representatives of the organization wore yellow T-shirts emblazoned with "Dirigo Reads" on the front and a quote from best-selling author Stephen King (a native of Bangor) on the back: "Books are a uniquely portable magic."

All runners went home with their own “portable magic” in the form of medals that volunteers handed out as athletes headed up the hill for free refreshments from blueberries to granola bars. Many also crowded around an electronic board that displayed finish times. Adding to the festive atmosphere, mascot Oakie the Acorn of Oakhurst Dairy posed for photos with runners and their families. Spuddy, the mascot of the Maine Potato Board, tried not to get too baked in the hot sunshine 300 miles south of his Aroostook County home. As thousands stood in line near Fort Williams's small, rocky beach known as Ship Cove for buses heading back to parking lots, a few took the opportunity to cool off in the ocean.