Yesterday was a tough race as the 90-degree temperature came out of nowhere.  We also ended up down 2 of our 9 runners due to injury/sickness, and also had a few runners not running 100%.  Despite all of this stacked against us, we had some good performances.

 

The biggest positive that stood out to me was how well the boys finished.  The race can be divided into three .75 mile chunks, with the 2nd and 3rd chunks being identical.  So, to see that all 7 of our runners went faster on the 3rd split (compared to the 2nd split), showed their grit and toughness, despite the heat.  From loop 2 to loop 3, Asher ran 32 seconds faster, Paul was 25 seconds faster, and Tate was 20 seconds faster.  Henry, LB, and Lawson were all 11 to 17 seconds faster and Gray was 1 second faster.  The first .75 miles on the course is likely easier and faster, going around a field and then the downhill "short" woods loop, so unlike Roslyn, there is probably going to be a bigger gap between split one and split two.  That being said, Gray was our most consistent between those first two splits, showing how much he pushed in that middle .75 mile loop.  He only had a 13-second difference between split one and split two.  Asher was the next closest with a 31-second difference.

 

The main goal coming in, before it was going to be 90, was to try and beat their Roslyn time from a week ago.  Despite the heat, our 3 new runners in yesterday's race, Henry/Gray/Asher, did just that.  Henry beat his Roslyn time by 29 seconds, breaking 15:00.  We don't have an all-time historical performance list for this course since it is brand new.  However, if we continue to run this race in future years, we would likely use the same Roslyn cutoff time of 15:00 for our all-time list, putting Henry on it.  Clearly Henry likes racing at St. Catherine's as he also did very well at the first meet at St. Catherine's.  Gray has continued to work down the pace each meet, improving 24 seconds from Roslyn and running a 6:46 mile place en route to being our #2 man (as he was at FUMA).  Asher was the other runner to drop time from Roslyn, dropping 14 seconds to run 18:00.

 

In the meet score, it was a very exciting race.  I can't remember one of these meets that had just a 14-point difference between the first team and the 6th team, so it was pretty cool to see this when calculating the score.  After getting 6th at Roslyn last week, without Steward or Collegiate even there, Seven Hills came out of nowhere to pull off the win yesterday.  They edged out Collegiate by 3 points who edged out Steward by 1 point (Steward was missing their #1 runner).  We were 6 points behind them at 96, missing our typical #4 runner.  There was a tie for 5th just 4 points behind us with St. Edward's and last week's Roslyn champion, St. Bridget.  What a wacky set of team scores.