Wow!  That pretty much sums up what I saw today at the cross country meet.  I don't know where to start.  This meet began in 2019 and 2020 was not well attended, likely due to Covid, so I did not know what to expect today.  On top of that, we have only run our team at Pole Green 3 other times (2017-2019), and 2 of those 3 years were on the different (slower and in the woods) course.  However, I knew the course today would be flat and fast, and with a lot of fast runners, it was a good environment to shoot for some fast times.  It would have been nicer to run Saturday morning as originally scheduled, when it was cloudy and 55, but despite the upper 70s and sun today, the boys ran out of their mind!  We were looking to be about 5-10 seconds faster for mile pace and around 20-25 seconds faster overall, compared to their St. Cat's 4k times from Tuesday.

 

Last night, after reading the meet preview posted on MileStat, pegging Jefferson Forest (Forest Running Club) and Blacksburg MS as the two favorites, I of course went venturing into the land of results for these two schools, trying to figure out how we would stack up.  I honestly had no idea what to expect in terms of a place result for our team today, so I was more curious than anything else.  After finding 3 different 4k results, with a wide variety of times, I really didn't know what to think.  I did find that Jefferson Forest ran in a meet last weekend with Louisa and beat them by 7.  We had beaten Louisa at FUMA by 13, so that seemed interesting.  I thought maybe we would have an outside shot at getting one of the top 2 trophies.  If not, I had a feeling we would still have a pretty good team finish.  It is easy to get caught up in a big meet and trying to win, but I really try to keep myself at bay as a coach in these situations.  I don't want the kids to think I don't care about winning, but I also don't want to dump more pressure on them, which could adversely affect their race.  In addition, if you don't win, everyone could run a great race and then feel like they let the team down or the coaches down by not winning.  That all being said, I mentioned to the boys that it was possible to walk out of their today with a team trophy for 1st or 2nd.  However, I tried to keep their focus on the task at hand of improving their times.  If the score worked out in our favor, that would be great, but I was more focused on them executing our race plan because I would be thrilled with personal best times, no matter if we finished 3rd or 23rd.

 

Boy did they deliver!  They dropped a cumulative 5:56 from their times on Tuesday at St. Catherine's, which was the same race distance.  That would be an impressive number for the whole squad of 19, but for just 7 guys to account for that almost 6:00 of dropped time...wow!  Four of our seven dropped at least 50 seconds from 5 days earlier, while 22, 26, and 32 seconds each from the other 3 runners was pretty good too.  Knowing the swim meets, soccer games, late nights, family struggles, ankle and Achilles pain that was all built up inside of these boys over the past days and weeks, not to mention a bundle of nerves that they all admitted to before the race, this made their accomplishments all the more impressive today.  Before this year, our best MS XC team to date was probably the 2018 squad (4 of the fastest STC Roslyn times ever, including the only 2 under 14:00, and 6 guys in total on that team under the 15:00 barrier at Roslyn).  At Pole Green in 2018, this squad had a 14:54, 15:14, 15:27, 15:35, 16:07, 16:12, 16:28.  Compare that to today's squad with 14:00, 14:59, 15:06, 15:21, 15:21, 16:00, 16:18, and we beat them in every position 1 through 7!  That 14:00.4 time from Asher today put him in 6th place overall, just about 2 seconds from 4th, and earning him a top-15 medal.  I know he was excited to get pushed today to a phenomenal time, another STC middle school record of his that may stand the test of time.

 

This meet today was by far the biggest, 246 runners, and the most difficult meet our middle school XC team has ever run in school history.  At the 2k mark, the halfway point, we were actually tied for 3rd with 116 points (110 and 87 were the top 2 teams at that point).  When all was said and done, we ended up in 4th place, just 4 points back from 3rd.  Ahead of us were 3 southwest Virginia schools, one a home school running group (more or less an all-star team from Roanoke), and two public schools (Blacksburg and Jefferson Forest).  We were the top private school and top non-southwest Virginia team.  Competing against public schools is always tough as they are faster on the whole in just about every state in the country, mainly because they have a bigger pool of people to make their teams.  With no 6th graders on our team, like many teams do have, to have 5 guys run 15:21 or better out of a pool of less than 170 is pretty good!

 

I am really glad we went and tested ourselves today.  Plus, this was a fraction of the craziness that ensues at the MileStat Invite (last weekend on this same course), especially parking for spectators.  I think it is something we may go back to and also try and get more of the other teams we compete against to join us.  That being said, the experience gained today by Mitchell, James, LT, and Brody will prove quite valuable next fall.  Since 2016, I have always wondered if we have one of the best middle school cross country teams in the state, public or private, and, despite the amount of teams that do not come to this race, it was nice to get some validation of that today.  Not so much for me, but for the program itself.  Our XC teams continue to be good because boys are drawn to the sustained success and improvement-focused environment, and my hope is that we are continuing to create that with the XC team every fall.