I know it was wet yesterday, but that was a great meet for the boys.  The rain started to taper off to a mist, temperatures were in the mid 60s, and that course actually does not get very muddy despite the volume of rain that fell leading up to the race.  There was so much improvement from our intrasquad meet which was only 11 days prior and was a shorter race (1.5 miles vs. 2.25 miles yesterday).  When you look at the detailed results attachment, look at the far right column in parentheses.  With the exception of Davis and Lawson who did not run the intrasquad meet, everyone on the team improved their mile pace substantially.  This ranged from a pretty good 23 and 26 second per mile faster pace from LB and James, respectively, to the ridiculous 2:56 per mile improvement for Charlie and 2:04 for Jack!  Tate was over 1:15 faster per mile which is also pretty good.  Hudson and Wickham also approached 1:00 per mile faster at 59 and 55 seconds faster, respectively.  Paul ran 46 seconds per mile faster and Teddy, despite going out a bit more aggressively in his mind, was still 33 seconds per mile faster.  Teddy also had a big improvement of 2:40 from his personal best at Roslyn last October.  Davis led the way for the Saints with his 3rd place overall finish, just 8 seconds behind the runner-up finisher.  His time was 4 seconds ahead of his first Roslyn time last year, which was also a rainy day (in the mid 70s though).  Davis already owns the accolade of 13th fastest runner in course history, but is now 3 for 3 at Roslyn in terms of breaking 15:00 (even 14:50 for that matter), a feat not often achieved.

 

In the scoring department, we were 8th out of the 10 scoring teams, but also technically beat 4 other teams who did not have enough runners to score (minimum 5).  Although 8th may not sound stellar, we were only 24 points out of 4th place.  To have 5 teams all within 24 points is pretty crazy and also shows the importance of moving up 1 or 2 finish places.  At the end of the day though, our goal is improvement, and as you read earlier, we certainly did an A+ job in that department.  Thinking about that improvement mindset, we will now be able to go into our first 5k at FUMA on 10/4, as well as our next Roslyn meet on 10/8, a little more prepared.  The guys who ran even or had way faster final splits now know that they need to go out harder next time.  Who knows, maybe our 2nd-3rd guys break 17:00, our 4th guy breaks 18:00, our 5th and 6th man get closer to our 4th man and maybe our secondary pack in the mid 21s runs in the mid 20s or faster.  No matter the goal, my hope is that the boys start to see that the training is working and we just need to keep doing what we do every day and let the cumulative effects of all those practices take over and keep the improvement train going into the latter part of the season.