It was great to get the first meet under our belts.  There was certainly some exciting fan support to go with it too!  Thank you to the coaches for all of their work regarding transportation of the kids and helping with traffic control on the course and in the finish chute.  I also want to thank the boys, particularly the veterans, for guiding the team through warm-up and cool down properly.  When we are hosting a meet, particularly this one with separate boys and girls races, the coaches are not as available to the boys.  It is nice to know the veterans can step up in these instances.

 

This was our third different race distance after a mile on the track in cooler conditions 2 weeks ago, then our .75 mile hilly course time trial last week in the heat at Roslyn, to a flatter and longer 1.5 mile course today.  With three different distances, it is no surprise that we had our third different top runner.  This is something that is a little uncomfortable, but something that will only help our team be stronger.  I think we gravitate towards finding our position on the team and then expect that to be the case every week (like how LT was always the top runner last year for us, then James, then Mitchell, etc.).  This year's team is likely not going to follow that script, and the moment the boys embrace that, the better we will be for it.  If I am expecting to always be the 3rd runner on the team, and I end up 4th runner on the team one meet, I shouldn't look at that in a negative way, but rather I should be psyched my teammate was able to move up the ranks because it only makes our team better.  Conversely, if I happen to be the 2nd runner next week, I would hope my teammates would be celebrating my improvement.  With different courses, weather, time of year, fatigue from school, cramps from lunch, etc all providing variable after variable, I expect a wide variety of finish orders this year, particularly among our top 6.  It was Liam, then Mac, then Charlie today, but maybe it is Grant or Asa taking the top spot next week, or maybe Liam is the top runner again because he likes hills and longer course, or maybe Mac since he smoked Mr. Carrier to win that intrasquad meet last Friday, or maybe Charlie continues his momentum from today.  Henry, Nic, and Aedan all finished in the span of 4 seconds despite their 31-second range at the halfway point, so maybe they will work together next week and finish in a different order.  With Rand only 15-20 seconds behind that trio today, maybe he tries to hang with them more next week.  Although I spent a lot of time addressing the finish position here, my goal is to help make us realize that the finish position is not the main goal of this team.  We want to improve and yes, of course the physical training piece is a big portion of that improvement, but so too is the mental side of distance running.  If we can take getting beat by a teammate, not dropping time, or running uneven splits and turn it into a positive, learning this resilience will certainly help us in future races as well as off the course.

 

Speaking of improvement, we had all 6 of our veterans equal their time from last year or better, with 5 of the 6 veterans dropping over 1:00, including Asa's drop of 3:02 and Nic's drop of 2:40 from a year ago.  We don't have the 2-loop version of Roslyn to compare it to, but using my extrapolated Roslyn times from this past Friday, we had some huge improvements.  As you will see on the attachment that I have included splits for each loop, the difference between the splits, and the mile pace.  I will always do a mile pace on each course as it helps find a common comparison variable.  In terms of the split comparison, the heat certainly factors into this more, but you can see that Charlie, Grant, and Harvie can afford to be a bit more aggressive next time, while Aedan, McCoy, and Mac may want to be more conservative/controlled during their first loop at Roslyn next week.  I think everyone else was close to the pace they should have run as I feel less heat/humidity would have kept their splits closer.

 

In terms of the score, this is always secondary to our time improvement goals.  That being said, it is nice to win a meet and we were able to do just that.  I was worried about St. Bridget coming in as I knew they would have the winner, but their second best runner was not there today, vaulting their score up above where I anticipated.  I was worried seeing the St. Mary's runners go 2, 3, then 7, but was pumped when our 5th man came in at 12th place, well before the St. Mary's 4th runner.  We ended up with a pretty solid win to start our season 7-0.  Although we don't have those front runners, yet!, that can score really low numbers, especially in a big race, we are going to pack it in just behind those leaders, and you saw that happen today as we went 8, 10, 11, 12 to go with Charlie's 4th place finish.  As Avery tries to get closer to the 5th man spot and Arjun and Harvie push each other for that 7th spot, things are looking good heading into more competition next week.  About half our team, 7 boys, ran their first official cross country meet ever today, so one final shout-out to them.  Welcome to the club!