The state meet first began in 2019 and we have now attended the previous 5 versions of this meet.  This was by far the biggest with 480 finishers on the boys side and there were certainly plenty of quality runners.  One of our goals in attending this meet is to give the boys the experience of a "big meet" atmosphere, so when they compete in high school at the state meet or other big races like this one, they have some experience and can learn to control their nerves and run their race.  In fact, 5 of our 7 runners are in 7th grade, so hopefully all will be back at states next fall to use that experience before high school.  It is also fun to get a race bib with your last name on it!  In addition to that experience, it is a great place to test ourselves and also run a 4k on a fast course just 10 days after running a hillier 4k at St. Catherine's.  The weather was ideal on Saturday with temperatures in the low 60s and dry conditions, some 15 degrees cooler than our St. Catherine's 4k and of course much more competition.  Although we were going in a bit short-handed with only 7 runners, everyone who ran did a great job being aggressive and it paid off in some big time drops.  I was a bit worried about this given our Collegiate 5k less than 48 hours before the state meet race.  Although Teddy did not run at St. Catherine's 10 days ago, the other 6 boys did.  With the exception of 1 of those 6, the other 5 dropped a consistent amount of time ranging from 1:14 to 1:34.  The 1 exception was Wickham who had a ridiculous drop of 4:16 from 10 days prior.  Clearly he liked the cool, flat course on Saturday, and also had a pretty big cheering section to spur him on.  This big drop vaulted him into our #5 runner position, once again adding another name to that list that is now up to 6 different people this season!  One other interesting tidbit of information is that along with Wickham, James and Hudson also had a faster mile pace for this 4k than they had for 1 mile in our opening time trial of the season (LB and Davis were pretty close too).  This is just another example of how far this team has come and how much work they have put in over the past 9+ weeks.  For those who like stats, this is a fun race to look at the stats with the live results as well as splits at 4 different places.  Along with those splits, Blue Ridge Timing also shows place changes over each of the 5 segments of the race.  It was great to see that LB, Hudson, and Wickham never lost a place the whole race and actually moved up at least 1 position each of the 5 segments of their race.  James did this on 4 out of the 5 segments, so that was pretty good too.

 

How about Davis Mullen.  We know Davis is pretty good, but he really stepped up in a big way at states.  Throwing himself into the mix with the leaders from the gun, he trusted himself to get through the race and hang tough to finish in the top 15 and earn an all-state recognition.  After running 14:34 last year, I figured he would have to drop around 45 seconds to earn an all state honor (under 13:50).  I was wrong, he needed under 13:40 to get that honor.  Luckily, after cruising to an easy win on Thursday at Collegiate, he had plenty left in the tank for states and dropped 1:34 from St. Catherine's to get well under that 13:40 mark.  After running this course/meet last year, and the 5k at Pole Green a week earlier, he was ready to go and finished in 10th place to earn all-state honors.  He became the 4th STC runner in the last 5 years to earn that honor, joining Asher Green, LT Nguyen, and Charlie Branch.  He just missed LT's best STC time on the course by 1.6 seconds, but still logged an incredible time where he averaged 5:27 mile pace.

 

In the team score, we finished 33rd overall, 28th among schools, and 6th among private/independent schools, beating 11 scoring school/club teams.