Page 42 continues the sentence with "national award".
Suddenly lurching to another page won't hide that use of "in the running" to refer to someone whose free time is spent literally running. I can't believe it's a deliberate pun, as the ECS is always so proud of those that it makes a big fuss of them. It's more a case of a subconscious connection between the topic of the article and a particular turn of phrase that could easily be replaced by another.
It's a weird place to put an article break, whatever.