Here's Pete Magill, who took third overall. But he was the No. 1 finisher for Team Runners High. Team finish in masters was determined not by points but by adding the times of a club's top five runners.

Nolan Shaheed crests a hill. Nolan lives in Southern California, but his SoCal club included runners from Oregon and Mississippi.

Dave Clingan, a Portland resident, finished with a time of just over 41 minutes. Not bad for a 50-year-old half-miler.

Clingan was elected as active athletes representative in the USATF Masters T&F Committee a few days earlier. Here he is being active.

Brian Pope and Pete Magill are longtime rivals. But off the track and roads they are pals. Clingan took both of them home, where they showered and later went off partying together.

USATF officials and masters activists John Cosgrove and Andy Hecker waited for the finish from in front of the betting odds signboard.

Brian Pope, 42, sprints to the finish of an amazing year that saw him capture national cross country titles at 5K, 8K and 10K in addition to track medals.

Pete Magill, who lost about 30 seconds with his fall at the moguls, came back to take third. In the spring, he won the Carlsbad 5000 road race -- beating Pope.

Dave Clingan was proud of taking eighth among the M50 runners -- and finishing just ahead Benji Durden, who ran a 2:09 marathon in the 1980s and now coaches world-class runners out of Boulder, Colorado.

Clingan offers and receives congratulations after the race -- which disappointed many runners. It lacked lap numbers and split times, and racetrack crews would sometimes drive right across the path of the runners.

Members of the SoCal Track Club get together after the race. They took fifth in the M40 team standings, despite averaging in the high 40s.

Nolan Shaheed's brand-new running spikes are caked with mud. At this point, my Nikon Coolpix begins showing effects of a dirty lens. That acounts for the softness or fuzzy areas in later shots.

Clingan got splattered with a little mud. But weather forecasts had been predicting rain for Saturday, the race day, and runners were grateful that mud was all they had to contend with.

Another gripe of masters runners: The digital clock (facing the finishers, not facing the camera) was missing dots in the readout, so finishers had trouble reading their time.

Although a racecourse was an interesting setting for a cross country meet, local Portland runners said that far better venues were available -- but that event sponsor Nike got its way on this locale.

M40 mile champion Tony Young mugged with his 10-year-old daughter Andi. dropped out of the 10K before the halfway point. He couldn't point to injury -- he just kept falling back and back, and felt bad.

Tony Young of Redmond, Washington, stuck around to congratulate the winners, however. Earlier in the week he won a USATF track athlete age-group award. Some thought he should have been Masters Athlete of the Year.

Brian Pope says he has size-12 feet, but sometimes wears size-14 shoes. He hails from Oxford, Mississippi.

An older runner kept gasping for air -- quite audibly -- after finishing the 6.2-plus-mile race in over an hour.

Members of the M40 champion Team Runners High mug for souvenir shots after claiming their national championship plaque, medals and patches. Their prize money would be mailed, officials promised.