Lynn Woods Handicap: An exercise in time management

LYNN – Staggered starts were the norm at Lynn Woods on Wednesday for the annual 5.5-Mile Handicap.Runners started the race at differing times based on their previous known mile pace performances.?The theory is, they all finish at about the same time within seconds,” said Joe Abelon, who founded the Lynn Woods Summer Cross Country Races in 1969. “It?s hard to do.”Participants got their start time before the race and assembled in the Great Woods Road parking lot. What followed was a period of waiting as runners watched for their start time to appear on the race clock.Runners took off in intervals of about a minute apart, with the slower runners starting earlier, the fastest runners going later and the last runner, or “scratch man,” going off just over a half-hour after the gun … er, cowbell.?The first time I started (the races), we had the 10-Mile Relay and the Handicap,” Abelon said. “It worked well.”The Handicap used to finish farther down the parking lot, Abelon said.?The whole street was lined with finishers,” he recalled. “It was a fun thing.”Abelon said that in the “old days of road running in New England, back in the ?60s and ?70s, there were many handicaps,” including a 10-miler by Bennie?s Pizza on Franklin Street in which the scratch man was none other than former Boston Marathon champion Johnny Kelley Jr.?He?d try to catch everybody,” Abelon said. “In those days, there were prizes. There was a table with appliances. Coffee makers, mixers, a little of this, a little of that. You could choose one.”?They used to be popular in New England,” race director Bill Mullen said. “There were at least one or two in Lynn, with fields of 100.”