Yesterday's meet was a quick turnaround from Roslyn last Thursday, especially given that we had a field trip for the 7s on Friday and just a few 8s for lifting, a long weekend, and only a pre-meet run on Tuesday before racing again.  It was also a new distance for us, even if we did run 1k further at FUMA.  After producing basically 100% improvement in some capacity at just about every meet, yesterday was a good reality check that improvement doesn't just happen because it is the next race.  It takes work, and specifically this past weekend, some on-your-own running work.  With 3 boys getting ready for Outre, 1 dealing with shin splints, and another who was not able to run on Tuesday, we seemed to be going into yesterday a bit dinged up.  The temperature creeping up a bit into the mid 70s was also something a bit unexpected that may have also played a factor in the varying results we earned yesterday.  Tuesday or even today may have been better racing weather, but that is out of our control so we make the best of the weather we get on race day.

 

I appreciated a few boys being more aggressive on this course yesterday.  Although slightly longer than Roslyn by .25 miles, I would say this course is slightly easier than Roslyn.  It still has its share of challenges like that long hill from the starting area that needs to be climbed twice as well as all of the soft/cushy (i.e. slow) grass surrounding the playing fields.  It is actually a good race to compare to Collegiate's 5k next Thursday.  Our goal yesterday was trying to beat our mile pace from Roslyn.  As with any goal, it does not automatically get met every time, but we had 4 out of 8 runners achieve that goal with 3 of the remaining 4 only adding single digit seconds (7 or 8) per mile.  Charlie led the improvement train with a 42-second drop (per mile!), James dropped 19, Davis dropped 17, and Hudson dropped 14.  Again, those time drops are per mile.  Although Jack did not run the last meet at Roslyn, kudos to him for running through some shin splint pain to not only start the race, but also finish it.  He was only 20 seconds off his mile pace from the first Roslyn meet despite his pain and lack of recent training due to shin splints.

 

Davis led the way for us again, finishing in the runner-up position thanks to chasing down the Veritas runner that he has battled back and forth with most of the season.  His time ranks him as the 7th fastest performer in course history, 5th among STC runners.  Behind Davis, we had some interesting movement in our top 5 as James was the closest he has been to LB all season.  Behind these boys was a new #4 man for us this week as Charlie ran guts out and hung on to finish in the top 25.  Hudson was right behind him in 27th, giving us our top 5 in 27th place or better.  This was a big change for us to have such a strong #5 man this week and it certainly paid off in the score.  We finished just 7 points behind Collegiate for 2nd, 57 to 64.  As I mentioned on multiple occasions earlier this year, we usually out-work/out-train many of the teams we compete against and tracking how we have continued to close the gap on Collegiate each meet is a good example of that.  If we had the SPAM race yesterday, scoring just us and Collegiate, Collegiate would win 26-29.  If we can find a way to continue to outwork them over the next two weeks, it may come down to a 1-point difference in the meet score.  Collegiate's 2-3-4 runners were just ahead of our 2-3 runners, so if we can flip the script on that, that would be enough to pull off the win, assuming our 4-5 runners have another strong day like they did yesterday.  Winning SPAM was almost going to be impossible when the season started, but you boys have trained hard to now make it possible.  Let's keep up the good work and make it more probable in the coming week!