That was a very impressive "unofficial" end to our season today.  When we lost that first meet at St. Catherine's 2 months ago to open the season, I was a little surprised and was already a little concerned about SPAM.  However, I told the boys the next day to outwork Collegiate over the next two months, and I think things would go our way at SPAM.  I felt like we kept putting more and more points between us and Collegiate in the various meets this year and today's 21-38 win was a big one, especially compared to where we started the year with that 28-30 loss.  That was the closest it has been since 2015 when we won 21-38.  This gave us our 8th straight win and 13 of the 17 titles overall.  They certainly did improve a ton from that first meet of the season.

 

At the end of the day, this is a fun race with the focus on SPAM, the jumps, the close-to-school course that we run on often, and the chance to step down and run fast in our 2nd shortest race distance of the year.  I am glad we get to keep the big trophy another year.  You saw how small the runner-up trophy is and that just would not look good in the front corner of my classroom!

 

The individual times were very impressive this year, from Collegiate and the Saints.  We did modify the course this year, but after re-measuring the old course and measuring this year's course twice, I am confident the fast times were a product of the strength of this year's STC squad, as well as Collegiate.  The perfect weather in the low 50s and the fact that we did not run our final mile time trial on Monday, as we have done most years, certainly helped too.  And, although Matthew could not run, it was great to have his support out there to cheer on the runners.

 

Asher obliterated the old course record of 11:56 with his time of 11:02.  Since the race is 2.02 miles, Asher would have run under 11:00 for 2 miles.  Only one person has ever done that in middle school history and it was on the track about 6 years ago and he ran 10:47.  We will keep an eye out on Asher's 3200 times this winter and spring during the upcoming track seasons.  It is also worth mentioning that Reid (Collegiate), James, and Liam also broke the old course record today.  James ran 11:43 and Liam ran 11:54.  LT (12th) and Mitchell (13th) got on the top 15 all-time list with their times as well.  STC owns 13 of the 15 top individual times at SPAM.

 

The closest race this would compare to is St. Cat's, but that race was over a month and a half ago, so everyone obliterated that mile pace today at SPAM.  Since all our recent races have been longer at 2.5 or 3.1 miles, this race would be too short to compare.  One fun item though in today's race is the time prediction contest.  Congrats to Mitchell (2 seconds off) and David (3 seconds off) for getting in the top 5 in that category.  We had some other close guesses with LT (7 seconds off) and Gentry (10 seconds off).  We had a couple more at 17 and 19 seconds away as well.