In my article on Alaska's Mount Marathon Race in the Spring 2015 Fellrunner magazine I described the achievements of a young athlete called Allison Ostrander. Now she has come to Wales and become a Junior World Mountain Running champion, by a margin of 38 seconds (and another Alaskan was silver medallist in the Junior Men's race).
It had occurred to me that, with her combination of speed on both the steepest, roughest mountain terrain and on the track and cross-country (US national schools cross-country champion 2014), Allie would be an ideal competitor for WMRC; although I only found out a few days ago that she was in the US team going to Betws-y-Coed. I think she has the potential for achievements comparable to Kenny Stuart: I am thinking here of Kenny's combination of outstanding success in two different running disciplines, fells and marathon. At the moment Allie's focus is on track and cross-country; apart from WMRC, the only mountain race she ever does is Mount Marathon. However, this year, in her first senior Mount Marathon race she broke the women's record that has stood since 1990 (although Emelie Forsberg turned up and took a much bigger chunk off the record). Maybe Allie will run a few Olympic 5k and 10k races and then turn to the mountains in a more serious way?
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Originally Posted by dnf
