Wow!  What a way to officially open the season.  The boys certainly had some excited-nervous energy going on throughout the day, as did the coaches!  As the person who manually times every runner at our home meets, I am also just hoping to not screw that up!  The weather was great and the boys certainly took advantage of that today.  Thanks to our experience at Roslyn last week, running the same distance, I felt like the boys were more prepared to attack the STC Goochland course today.  Other than a few boys who had a faster 2nd half of the race, most boys were about 15-25 seconds slower on the second lap.  This is a good place to be in terms of being aggressive on lap one but still having some left on lap two.  We typically average about 45 seconds per mile faster here than we do at Roslyn, based on some of our team's historical data.  Given the weather difference from last Friday to today, we were hoping the boys would be closer to 1:00 faster mile pace today.  With the exception of our two boys that did not run last Friday, everybody on the team hit that minute improvement mark and actually surpassed it.  In fact, the least, yes least, amount of improvement (per mile) by any runner was 1:20.  Most of the team had a 2:00 per mile faster mile pace (compared to last Friday), including Charlie who was over 3:00 per mile faster today and Jack who was almost 4:00 per mile faster than last Friday.  This is just a phenomenal improvement across the board and really shows how mentally tough the boys are as they were willing to push themselves today and we certainly saw the benefit of that.  A coach came up to me after the race and said they were surprised they got so close to us today but they know that our team seems to improve the most as the season progresses, a credit to the great work ethic of previous STC middle school teams and their willingness to work hard everyday during the season.  I echo that feeling and am excited to see this year's group carry on that "hard work everyday" mentality and continue to improve as the season progresses.  If this group can improve as much as they did over the previous 4 or 5 days since Roslyn, they too should be excited about what lies ahead when they put in the daily work.  For our new runners, we once again saw a huge improvement for our veterans from last year's race, with Ely dropping over 4:30, Teddy over 2:40, and Davis dropping 13 seconds off of an already fast time.  That only adds to the excitement of what a season can do for a runner not only by the end of the season, but also a year later.

 

In the score, we held our own finishing about mid-pack in 4th place, just edging out Seven Hills by 2 points in 5th place.  St. Bridget was ahead of us by 19 points, but swap out their 4th runner and slide the 6th runner in for scoring and we end up beating them.  Collegiate finished 2nd, and are usually tough to beat with 9th-10th graders on their team.  That being said, their top 3 runners are 7th graders and their 4th runner is an 8th grader.  Their 5th, 6th, and 7th runners are all 9th graders, so we will certainly have our hands full with them at SPAM later this season.  Hunter is still a pretty new school, but they are led by the former Veritas head coach and since cross country is their only school sport offered in the fall, they tend to have quality teams.  We will see many of these teams again throughout the season, and will even add a few more to the mix next week at Roslyn.  Again though, finish place is not really our main concern.  We are looking for improvement from the boys.  We have already seen some during our first few weeks and we look forward to seeing it continue.  My final takeaway from today's meet is that we had a pretty tight pack as a group today with under 3:00 separating our #2 man from our #12 man (compared to almost 8:00 last year), so if we can keep pushing each other, the big pack is only going to get faster!