Dear Middle School Cross Country Parents and Runners,

 

Today certainly felt like Fall with temperatures not making it out of the 50s, a light breeze that actually felt "cold", and the leaves not as green as they were when we ran here back in September.  Today was a great day for the team in a lot of ways, arguably their best race of the season.  It may have been the weather, and although I am not fully kicking that to the curb, I am leaning more towards the accumulation of the training since late August (or even earlier on their own) and their maturation as runners over this month and a half.  As with any home meet, the coaches are not as present as away meets.  That being said, the boys did a good job understanding the course, warming up properly, running hard and trusting their training to push themselves, and even doing a decent job on the cooldown and bus rides.  I was also impressed when the post-meet snacks were placed next to them near the blue shed by the finish line.  They all fought temptation since they had not done the cooldown and several even got up to cross that field to cheer on a teammate as he finished.

 

The times were phenomenal as well, which also supported my statement that this was their best meet of the season.  Before I get into those numbers, I would first like to give a shout-out to Rand Shumadine.  After injuring himself the evening of the intrasquad meet back on September 6th, today ended up being Rand's season debut at a race.  Regardless of how he did today, he has dealt with a lot of challenges during his 40-day hiatus from racing.  After closing out the season at FUMA in 22:21 last year, I was hoping to see Rand as one of our top-5 runners this season, but his injury certainly made that challenging.  However, in a true example of Rand's determination and commitment to this team, he stayed on the squad, did some biking (which I personally get bored of after 1 or 2 days let alone 30ish days), took some rest days, checked in with the trainer, tried running, faced more pain and setbacks leading him back to biking and resting again, and eventually got a string of running days in the past week with minimal pain.  This is not how a typical middle schooler would respond to this situation.  It would be easier to leave the team, not cross train, or just give up on rehab and call your season over on September 6th.  I give Rand credit for sticking with the team this season, especially all those lonely times biking while the team was out running.  We have just over 2 weeks remaining in the season, but a short season is certainly better than no season, so I look forward to Rand getting more in shape during these next handful of days.  Despite all this adversity, Rand was only 20 seconds off his time on this course from last season.

 

Speaking of improvement, it was certainly all over the place today.  We had a trio of veterans (Avery did not run this course last season) drop very substantial time from this meet last season.  Henry Peace dropped a whopping 3:13, McCoy Eakin dropped 2:18, and Charlie Branch dropped 1:12 from 2023.  More impressive and more recent was our comparison of today with Roslyn last week.  Despite today's race being .25 miles longer, every runner had substantial mile pace drops from a week ago.  Yes, it was cooler today and the boys didn't have to run up that steep Roslyn hill three times, but there are still plenty of hills out there today and again, it was a longer race today.  Of the 9 runners who ran last week (no Teddy this week and no Rand last week), they had an average mile pace improvement of 34 seconds.  That is almost a minute and a half (1:25) of total time on a 2.5 mile course, per runner!  One other reference point we gave the boys today was to shoot for the middle of their Roslyn mile pace from last week and their mile pace from the first St. Cat's race on September 10th (given that this was 1 mile longer than the short race over a month ago).  Many of the boys beat that goal, and then some.  The most impressive stat to me came from McCoy, Brennan, and Ely as each of these runners had a faster mile pace on this course today that was a mile longer than the course over a month ago!  Ely was 22 seconds per mile faster, Brennan was 12 and McCoy equaled his mile pace from the September 10th meet.  Avery wasn't far off with being 1 second over and Henry Peace only 5 seconds over their mile paces from September 10th.  We are certainly hitting our peak performance at the right time heading into the state meet in over a week.

 

After logging a win in the first STC Goochland meet, Charlie was looking to do it again this meet, once again battling with the top runner from Lourdes.  Charlie led about 2 miles of the race, but the Lourdes runner pulled ahead as they exited the woods, holding off Charlie by 2 seconds for the win.  And, although it may be frustrating to fall short of the win these last few meets, Charlie is certainly laying down some impressive & historical times.  Today was no exception as he ran the 4th fastest time ever on the course, just 18 seconds behind LT & Grayson's meet record.  We certainly packed it in behind Charlie going 2, 3, 5, 6 with our top 4, and Burn logging a 15th place to round out our scoring.  The 25 points we scored today was a season low, so well done there.  Veritas was without their top runner and Lourdes was without their #2 runner and with them as the 2nd and 3rd place teams in the meet, a full squad for both of them may have made it a tight one for the win.  Nevertheless, we piled on 7 more wins to go to 48-0 on the season.  Score aside, the way the runners pushed themselves today, whether that be early on or late in the race, I think we are carrying some great momentum into the state meet next weekend.