Thank you again to the parents for all their support at our meet on Wednesday, braving the weather and helping pitch in with cleanup.  This was a very successful meet for us compared to what we did on the course two weeks prior, running a shorter version of the race for our intrasquad meet.  This meet was longer (2.25 versus 1.5 miles), but luckily we had much cooler weather as well as a lot of competition.  The addition of teams this week like St. Bridget, Steward, and Seven Hills, not to mention St. Michael's, really beefed up the competition on top of the teams we faced last week who were once again at this week's meet.  The longer, hillier course (than St. Catherine's) also served as good prep for the FUMA 5k this Saturday.

 

Our goal going in was to run a faster mile pace than the boys averaged during our intrasquad meet two weeks prior.  I was pleased to see that everyone on the team did that, ranging from 9 seconds per mile faster to 85 seconds per mile faster.  Lawson was that 85-second improvement guy with Tate right behind him at 84 seconds per mile of improvement.  Four others, Asher, Paul, Gray, and Henry, were each over 30 seconds per mile faster than two weeks ago.  This shows a lot of growth physically from practice and mentally in learning from the intrasquad meet.  I think there was also a little bit of grit in there for those who were trying to beat someone from another team that beat them last week.  The other piece we look at is the splits, trying to keep the first few within 20 seconds of each other, and then dropping time for loop 2 to loop 3.  Asher (+24/-16) and Gray (+15/-5) did a great job of that, getting close to our ideal splits of +20/-10.  Tate and Lawson were also close to this ideal, basically running equal splits on loops 1 & 3, with about a 20-second increase from loop 1 to loop 2.  The way these boys ran this race should give them a lot of confidence going into FUMA on Saturday.

 

After a tight battle for 2nd last week at St. Catherine's, edging out Collegiate by 4 and Lourdes by 14, it was once again tight for 4th place this week with those two schools.  We edged out Collegiate again, this time by 5, and we actually tied Lourdes, needing the 6th man tiebreaker to pull out the victory against them.  Veritas once again dominated and is in a league of their own with 5 in the top 12 and 12 in the top 50.  St. Bridget and Steward did well just ahead of us (they both were not at St. Catherine's last week), but both teams were close enough to us that we could have a chance to beat them at a meet later in the season.  On the surface, getting 4th instead of 2nd may not seem like a positive thing, but knowing that two new teams were there that weren't the previous week, should easily explain that.  Plus, the reason we don't focus so much on the score is that seeing the huge mile pace improvements that we saw is a much more accurate measure of success.