Darius Terry, two-time Double winner going into the race, outlegged a competitive, experienced field to win the Double 15K in the San Jose Double Racing Festival, Sat., Aug. 21, in San Jose, Calif., as he posted an aggregate time of 47:39.

There were three former Double 15K winners on the starting line at San Jose – Darius Terry, Adam Roach and Osamu Tada – plus a newcomer to the Double 15K, Nicholas Spector, who had won all three Double 8K’s he had run, including the first two 8K Double Adventure Runs in San Francisco. With a field like that, how would all of this shake out in a Double 15K that truly had some real suspense?

It turned out Darius Terry, who’s 24 and lives in San Jose, was clearly superior on this day. The former Arizona State track star in the 1500 meters ran the opening 10K leg in 31:51 (5:08 pace) to establish a decisive one-minute, 31-second lead over Adam Roach, 31, of Monterey, Calif., who ran the 10K leg in 33:22. Nick Spector, 23, was another second back in 33:23. Masters runner Robert Verhees, 49, of San Diego, Calif., actually had the fourth fastest time in the 10K – 35:34 – with Osamu Tada, 35, of Sacramento, Calif., finishing fifth in 35:41.

It was now clear that Terry had the victory all sewn up, but it was strictly up in the air who would finish second on overall time, since Roach and Spector had been only a second apart in the 10K. Likewise, it was unclear who would finish fourth, since only seven seconds separated Verhees and Tada.

As it turned out, Terry would run the 5K in 15:48 (5:05 pace) to give him a combined time of 47:39, more than enough for victory – and a decisive one besides!

In the battle for second, Spector completely outdistanced Roach in the 5K, running 16:08 compared to Roach’s time of 16:41. This put the younger runner way ahead on combined time, 49:31 to 50:03. Spector had run 5:23 per mile in the 10K and 5:12 per mile in the 5K, which suggests that in his first Double 15K ever he decided to run conservatively in the opening leg and put the pedal to the metal in the concluding leg. Roach, by comparison, ran 5:22 per mile pace in both the 10K and the 5K.

The battle for fourth place again saw the man who needed to come from behind do exactly that, as Osamu Tada ran the 5K in 16:48 while Robert Verhees could only manage a 16:57. This gave Tada fourth place on combined time by the narrowest of margins – 52:29 to 52:31.

The women’s winner in the Double 15K in San Jose was Julita Baker, 33, of San Ramon, Calif., who ran the 10K in 40:19 (6:30 pace) and the 5K in 19:48 (6:23 pace) for a combined time of 1:00:07.

Masters runner Michelle Kern, 51, of Aptos, Calif., was the runner-up in 1:02:54 as she ran the 10K in 42:03 and the 5K in 20:51.

Monica Jo Nicholson, 33, of Aromas, Calif., finished third with a combined time of 1:04:26 (42:49/21:37).

And then there was the amazing Christine Kennedy, 60 years young from Los Gatos, Calif. She had suffered a horrific mishap at her apartment building 2½ months earlier, taking such a bad fall while some construction was going on that she suffered a fractured skull and was unconscious for an hour! She missed weeks of training, lost all or most of the conditioning that was supposed to propel her to world records galore this year in the women’s 60 and over age group, but more out of curiosity than competitiveness, she decided to run the Double 15K in San Jose anyway – “Just to see where I was at.”

Where she is at, apparently, is that even with almost no conditioning base, she was able to run the 10K in 44:26 (7:10 pace), the 5K in 21:40 (6:59 pace) for a combined time of 1:06:06, which placed her fourth in the women’s race and gave her still another Double Victory Cup for best age-graded performance. She always wins the Double Victory Cup, and even though her age-graded score this time was only 90.32, the lowest score she’s ever posted in winning the Double Victory Cup, this, in fact, may have been her most remarkable victory yet. Despite her awful injury (it remains to be seen whether she can recapture the fitness and form she had before this happened), she’s still very much … amazing!

There were two other Doubles on the program at the San Jose Double Racing Festival, presented by IDT, on Sunday.

Garrick Chan, 22, of Saratoga, Calif., and Liv Brashears, 16, of San Jose were the men’s and women’s winners in the Ujena Double 5K, which consisted of an opening 3K leg followed by a 2K leg.

Chan ran the 3K in 9:36 and the 2K in 6:31 to win the men’s race with a combined time of 16:07.

Alan Alarcon, 36, of San Jose was second in 16:19 (9:39/6:40) and Omar Pina, only 14, also of San Jose, finished third in 17:11 (10:15/6:56).

Liv Brashears was the women’s winner in 20:39 (12:10/8:29), with Cassandra Jesmonth, 26, of Mountain View, Calif., finishing second in 22:24 (13:25/8:59), and Masters runner Jackie Silva, 41, of San Jose ending up third in 22:42 (13:19/9:23). Silva actually ran the 3K faster than Jesmonth, but she couldn’t match her younger rival’s speed in the 2K.

An eye-opening achievement in the Double 5K was the performance of 11-year-old Elliott Daniels of Campbell, Calif., who finished fifth overall with an aggregate time of 17:58 (10:40/7:18). And, mind you, this was on a day when he actually ran a double Double, because he was also the boys winner in Bob Anderson’s Kids' Cup Double 1.5 Mile in San Jose, running the mile in 6:08 and the half-mile in 9:21 for a combined time of 9:21.

The girls winner in the race was Emily Minjares, 12, of San Jose, who actually ran faster than the boys winner as she did the mile in 6:04 and the half-mile in 3:05 for a combined time of 9:09.

Curious minds want to know, Elliott: Did you hold back a little and let Emily beat you, or is she that good? []

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