It was a nice day to be out at Collegiate and watch the race, albeit a little warm for a late October 5k.  Despite being spoiled last week with temperatures in the upper 50s for our St. Catherine's 2.5 mile race, today's weather was very similar to the first 5k we ran at FUMA 17 days ago.  In those 17 days since FUMA, I was confident that our training and increased mental toughness during a race would overtake the 80-degree weather and still yield a dropped time from FUMA.  There were 6 of our 10 runners from FUMA that indeed ran faster this 2nd attempt at a 5k this season.  FUMA is secretly faster than it seems and Collegiate is deceptively slow as about a 1/3 of the race is run on those four fields.  Lourdes once again did get relatively close in the score, 47 to 81.  We beat 12 teams, pushing our undefeated record to 60-0 this season.  This marked our 4th straight year winning, 8th of the past 9 years/races, and 11th of the 17 races ever held.  I normally start with some of the improvement numbers as more stress is placed on that than team finish.  However, as this race has been our most dominant over the years, in terms of wins, therein lies the ultimate sign of improvement within that season.  We have not always won every meet during the early part of the season, but we have seemingly dominated this late-season race because I think we basically outwork other teams during the season.  Lourdes is a good example of that this year as they were pretty close to us in the first meet without a full squad, yet they had a full squad today when we beat them.  In 2021, Collegiate beat us in the opening race of the season at St. Cats 28-30, but then we proceeded to beat them at this Collegiate 5k a month and a half later, 34-56, with both sides using the same exact people in both races.  This is just another example of how hard the boys have worked this year to carry on that tradition of success and improvement.

 

Speaking of improvement, there was certainly plenty of that despite the warmer day.  The veterans did well compared to last year with McCoy dropping a ridiculous amount of 8:45.  Even though he ran Collegiate last year about 4:00 slower than FUMA earlier that year, it is still an impressive time drop.  Henry dropped 2:48 from last year, with Charlie at :55 and Avery at :35.  Rand, off his very minimal training, was only :24 over his time from last year.  Pretty good considering his race today was the longest run he has done since early September!  As we look within this season, I mentioned that we had 6 time drops (almost 7 as Charlie was only 2 seconds over) from FUMA just 17 days ago.  Thanks to some negative splits (running faster each split during the race), Ely had a huge drop of 3:30 from FUMA.  Brennan also had a triple-digit improvement of 1:07 while Guy just missed that at 59 seconds of improvement.  Like Ely, Guy also ran negative splits, and other than Davis, had the fastest final .1 of anyone on the team.  As I have said earlier in the season about Guy, he has still yet to really push the front end of his races, so we are hopeful to see that in one of the final few races.  It was also nice to see him close the gap on our #5 man, just 1:47 behind the 5th man today (compared to 3:00 behind at FUMA).  Henry and Avery also had nice time drops of 42 seconds and 34 seconds, respectively from FUMA.  And, although it was only one second, Davis' 1-second drop put him under the magic 20:00 barrier, becoming the 27th STC MS runner to ever achieve that feat.  Davis now ranks tied-54th all-time at this Collegiate JV Invite among all teams.  Charlie's time ranks him 41st all-time at this meet.