Runners prove strength to themselves in tough Governor’s Cup race

Encouraging text messages from her friend running ahead of her helped motivate Kelli Stenger to finish her first half-marathon Saturday.

Proud but trembling from the exhaustion of the 13.1-mile Governor’s Cup Road Race, Stenger embraced Chrissie Miller on the other side of the finish line. Miller, a two-time half-marathon runner, had been Stenger’s trainer and cheerleader over the past month of preparation for what is one of the oldest races in the Southeast.

“She doesn’t ever stop, so watching her is encouraging,” 28-year-old Stenger said of Miller, 38. The hardest part of running the race, Stenger said, was not being able to see Miller ahead of her. “I knew she was ahead of me, and I knew she wasn’t stopping. I just couldn’t see her.

“She would text me, ‘You’ve got this.’ ‘Be strong.’ ‘It’s just a hill.’”

Stenger began running almost three years ago after her son, Mason, was born. But she had never run more than eight miles at a time before a month ago when she decided she would tackle the half marathon.

Stenger and Miller were among about 500 runners who took on the Cup’s redesigned course Saturday morning. The apparent consensus, even among the most seasoned of them, was that the new course looping through parts of downtown Columbia and across the Congaree River, was one of the toughest and hilliest they had run.

Clocking in at just over 67 minutes – averaging a little more than five minutes per mile – 37-year-old Nicholas Kurgat topped the field. A native of Kenya living in Chapel Hill, N.C., Kurgat said the Governor’s Cup was the race he had been training for above all others.

“The course is tight, so hilly,” he said, dripping sweat and resting by a tub of ice-cold water bottles as his closest competitors began to trickle across the finish line behind him.

On the women’s side, Zipporah Chebet, of Kenya, bested the field with a time of 1:16:37. Chebet also won the women’s race in 2014.

Taking her final strides about six minutes behind Chebet, third-place women’s runner Shawanna White was finishing her third half-marathon of the year.

Thirty-six-year-old White, who teaches physical education to elementary and middle schoolers in St. Matthews, wears a silver necklace with a pendant engraved with “26.2,” the mileage of a full marathon. She hopes to be able to try out for the 2020 Olympics, she said.

“Today it was kind of rough, and I just kept telling myself, ‘You’ve got this. You’ve got to keep going, keep going, keep going,’” White said. “I love running. I love racing. I love competing. I love seeing how far, how good I can become.”

Likewise, the “glory” of racing is what motivates Brett Morley to consistently push through the pain of 13.1 miles, he said. Named 2015’s South Carolina Long Distance Runner of the Year, the 24-year-old has run races as long as half-marathons every two to three weeks recently, he said.

Just two days before the race, Morley was in the hospital being treated for a severe case of strep throat. But, as his Greenville Running Co. teammate Josh Cashman said, “runners hate giving up or ... admitting that they’re down for the count.”

“It eats at us,” Morley said. “I like the glory that comes with it. You see all your hard work pay off.

“My favorite day is race day.”

This story was originally published May 14, 2016 at 12:54 PM with the headline "Runners prove strength to themselves in tough Governor’s Cup race."