Our first and only Saturday meet of the season was certainly a successful one for the Saints.  The temperature was perfect, right around 60 degrees, with no humidity or wind.  The course was solid and began and ended with plenty of flat, there were a lot of fast runners, and running a race at an earlier time of day gave everyone a bit more energy going into the race.  This all combined with our more aggressive race tactics to yield some excellent times.

 

We purposely ran the same distance at St. Catherine's a month ago so I could use that race to show some improvement on this 2.5 mile course.  And, in that month, there was improvement abound from the three guys who dropped over 1:00 (Gray at 1:28, Declan at 1:19, and Alex at 1:06), down to the 28 seconds that Henry dropped.  And, even in comparison to just over a week ago at Roslyn, on a shorter course, just about everyone dropped time from their mile pace in that race.  Declan dropped 41 seconds per mile, Gray dropped 35, Cade dropped 28, and Colby dropped 22, just to name a few.  Patrick Mayer dropped a whopping 1:43 per mile!

 

We had a nice tight top 3 with Grady, Gray, and Alex all coming in within 3 seconds of each other.  Colby and Henry rounded out our top 5 and we once again kept our spread under 1:00.  Spread that out even further and we had all of our top 11 within 3:00 of each other.  Grady led the way for us in 20th place, just missing the medals by 5 spots.  And, and I mean no offense by this, thanks to our tight pack, I was very surprised that we finished 3rd place out of 13 teams.  Most of the teams did not score as they had fewer than 5 runners, since 31 teams were actually represented in the race.  I was thinking we would be about 6th place, but we beat Veritas (who has beaten us twice this year) and Locust Grove (who beat us at FUMA).  Robious Middle School had the first and third runner overall and always beats us at this meet, so I thought they beat us today as well.  I was glad to be wrong!  We were also pretty close to Powhatan with just a 10-point gap.  The top two teams earned a trophy, so we just missed out!  This sets up well to be a good battle next Thursday at Collegiate as we will likely need to beat Powhatan and Veritas to secure our 5th straight Collegiate 5k title.  I hope the boys are up for the challenge!