After dealing with rain at our last two meets, it was a great day to run with a sunny day and temperatures in the mid 60s at race time.  This is our one longer away meet and our only morning race of the year, which can be helpful to not have to run after getting worn out from a school day.  The weather, combined with the earlier-in-the-day race time were certainly helpful today as we braved our first 5k of the season.  Despite the challenging nature of the course and distance, I think the boys were excited to race this morning, coming off the heels of their great mile time trial earlier in the week.  There was also some extra excitement as we saw a lot of new teams and the Irvings dropped off doughnuts for after the meet (as they did for this meet last season)!

 

Despite being .85 miles longer than Roslyn, our goal coming into today was to try and better our mile pace at that Roslyn meet from 2.5 weeks ago.  And, much like we did at that Roslyn meet, crushing our mile paces from the intrasquad meet despite going up in distance, we repeated that achievement this morning at FUMA.  All 9 runners in action had a substantially faster mile pace for this FUMA 5k than they did at Roslyn several weeks ago.  We averaged over 41 seconds (per mile!) faster, with Lawson, Paul, and Wickham leading the charge in that department.  This trio each ran over 1:00 per mile faster in this 5k than they did at Roslyn several weeks ago.  We are certainly firing on all cylinders and I am excited to see us attack Roslyn again later this week.

 

Davis was the top returner of any team from the race a year ago, running 20:00 to finish 4th.  However, the top runner from Veritas was just ahead of Davis at the Roslyn meet a few weeks ago, so we were looking forward to a good battle on the course today.  Louisa also has strong runners as they have recently been team champions on many occasions (when we have not won this race).  Davis and the top Louisa runner crushed the first mile, coming through under 5:40.  Davis started pulling ahead toward the middle of the race with the Veritas runner working his way closer.  Davis hung tough as both boys exited the woods to complete one more upper loop of just under a mile.  Despite a busy lacrosse schedule over the past 48 hours, Davis found the strength to hang on and stretch his lead to a 12-second victory, becoming just the 3rd STC runner to win the individual title at this race.  Not only that, Davis was very excited about his time.  After hovering around his times last year in the previous two meets, Davis crushed his time in this race from last year, running 45 seconds faster.  In addition to that, his time moved him up on the all-time STC MS 5k list from 26th to 10th, meaning that I will need to update my XC record board on Monday.  Davis became the 3rd fastest STC runner on this course while still holding the 11th fastest time from his race as a 7th grader last year.

 

Behind Davis, along with the great times earned by all, as already mentioned, we were close to securing a few more medals (top 25 individuals).  LB finished in 29th with James in 35th, not too far from the medals.  Those two had great 5k debut times in the low to mid 22s.  Hudson, our solid #4 man, also continues to creep closer to James, only making our team that much stronger.  And, for the 4th straight meet (including the intrasquad meet), we had a new #5 man.  From Ely (intrasquad) to Teddy (St. Cat's) to Charlie (Roslyn #1), our new #5 man this week was Lawson.  He was really pushing himself this week after being sidelined for a few days, and if he can keep pushing himself, he might be our first repeat #5 man of the season.

 

In the scoring, we edged out Rustburg by 7 points for 5th out of the 7 scoring teams.  There were, however, 15 teams in action, but 8 of them did not have a scoring 5 to earn a team score.  We have not finished out of the top 5 since 2013, so congrats to the boys for keeping that streak going.