It was another great weather day for a cross country meet, especially for the spectators.  This second Roslyn meet is arguably my favorite meet of the season (after SPAM of course) because it is the only meet where we get a chance to run on the same exact course a second time.  We usually catch better weather too, so it is a great recipe for personal best times.  It allows for a lot of comparison in terms of splits and paces from the first meet.  You can tell a lot of the boys learned something from the first meet and tried to make adjustments this meet (most notably going out harder).

 

The best news of the day was that, for the first time this season, we had a full squad running as we welcomed Patrick into the fold for his first meet of the season.  The second best news of the day was that everyone dropped time from the first Roslyn meet.  This ranged from Tate's 2:11 improvement all the way down to Colby's 13 second improvement.  We had some other big drops on the day like Alex's 52 seconds, Declan's 1:27, Patteson's 1:37, and Ben's 1:50.  The "loaner" shorts once again reigned supreme for the second meet in a row.  Less than a week after Gray donned the noticeably shorter loaner shorts last week, vaulting him to be our number one runner at FUMA, Ben was in the loaner shorts this week, leading him to drop almost 2:00.  If we are looking for a secret weapon next meet, I will have to dig through my collection of loaner shorts and see how many pairs we have.  Hopefully it is enough to outfit the whole team!  Along with these big time drops, take a look at the mile pace drops from the first meet.  Those too are impressive.  And, rather than do my usual rounding, I did want to make sure that everyone saw that Patteson just squeaked under the 9:00 mile pace barrier this meet, hence the slightly odd mile pace number in the results.

 

One other metric we use at Roslyn is the split difference for the three loops.  After years of research, we have found that a +20/-10 is the ideal way to run a best time.  As I mentioned earlier, many of the boys went out a lot harder this meet, but their increased fitness allowed them to hang on a bit and still get a best time.  Declan almost had the perfect +/- with a +21/-9 and Alex was also pretty solid at +28/-11, as was Cade with a +17/-5.  And, although Patrick had some hip pain return during the middle of the race, he looked great for two loops running along with Liam.  Selfishly, I did miss Patrick today as he has been such a huge help to us, like having another assistant coach.  He has been getting splits at FUMA and Goochland for us and am not sure if I have mentioned that in my prior meet wrap-ups, so I wanted to do that now.

 

We returned to our typical finish order this meet with Grady leading the way and Alex in 2nd, but only one second off of Grady.  Grady's time ranks 14th on the overall Roslyn list and 9th on the STC list, with Alex one spot behind in each category.  Alex's time of 14:36 is the second fastest time ever run by an STC 7th grader (10 seconds behind Aubrey Bowles from 2015).  Gray, Henry, and Colby once again rounded out our scoring five.  We once again had an impressive score, putting 5 in the top 14 and keeping our 1-5 spread under 1:00.  We also developed a nice mid-pack with three guys in the 16s and a 4th not too far off.  Despite all of this, Veritas once again found a way to beat us by 6 points.  We did beat the other 9 teams to move our record to 40-6 on the season, but I know that double-win by Veritas at Roslyn meets this year does not sit well with the boys.  We had the better 2 and 5 man this time around, but they got their lead on us in the 3 and 4 man areas.  I think we will get another crack at them at least once, of not twice, in the coming weeks.