2020 Holy Cross Invite #3

Congratulations to everyone on another fantastic meet today! I spoke to the boys after their race at Holy Cross so today will be relatively short and sweet. I'll get right into the results from today's race and then leave you with some final thoughts in closing.

As always, in blue, I have noted all athletes who set a new PR (personal record) in the cross country 5k (3.1 mile). In red, I have noted all athletes who set a new SB (season best), but not PR, in the cross country 5k. Also, any athletes who ran last week had an opportunity to set a new PCB (personal course best) for the Holy Cross 5k, and those will be marked in silver.

Junior Varsity

Here are the results for our junior varsity athletes (17 total entries in the race). The number in front of each name signifies their overall place in the junior varsity race. In brackets are their first mile, second mile, and last 1.1 mile splits:

6 Jaiden Mosley (Sr.) - 21:56.3 [(1) 6:30, (2) 7:10, (3.1) 8:17] PCR by 34 seconds

11 Jonah Lyke (So.) - 26:17.3 [(1) 7:26, (2) 8:33, (3.1) 10:19]

12 Austin Boynes (Jr.) - 28:23.8 [(1) 7:59, (2) 9:52, (3.1) 10:34]

13 Peter Brown (Fr.) - 29:42.7 [(1) 8:25, (2) 9:36, (3.1) 11:42] PCR by 51 seconds

15 Ian Brown (Jr.) - 32:29.8 [(1) 8:47, (2) 10:32, (3.1) 13:11] PCR by 4 minutes 8 seconds

17 Maximo Legaspi (So.) - 34:07.2 [(1) 9:48, (2) 11:42, (3.1) 12:37]

Congrats to Jaiden, Peter, and Ian on improving their times substantially from last week! And a special shoutout to Austin, as this was his first race of the season apart from our time trials. It's different running in a race than in a time trial, which is more like a regular training run, and he had a nice race today.

Team Results

1. Georgetown Prep 17 points

2. DeMatha 46 points

The results on Milesplit don't indicate the same thing I have here because Georgetown Prep and St. John's both had to compete unattached rather than as their schools, which means they all got lumped together as "Unattached (Team)," so I've gone through to identify who is with witch school (and did the same for varsity below).

Varsity

Here are the results for our varsity athletes (39 total entries in the race). The number in front of each name signifies their overall place in the varsity race. In brackets are their first mile, second mile, and last 1.1 mile splits:

1 Jayden Keels (So.) - 17:48.9 [(1) 5:34, (2) 5:46, (3.1) 6:29] PR by 8 seconds PCR by 9 seconds

3 Dawson Grogan (Jr.) - 18:07.9 [(1) 5:37, (2) 5:47, (3.1) 6:43] PCR by 20 seconds

4 Sayid Shakur (Fr.) - 18:36.8 [(1) 5:49, (2) 5:47, (3.1) 7:01] PR by 11 seconds PCR by 11 seconds

5 Gavin Foran (Sr.) - 18:45.2 [(1) 5:42, (2) 6:10, (3.1) 6:52]

7 Nick Sims (So.) - 18:47.7 [(1) 6:01, (2) 6:04, (3.1) 6:43] PR by 2 minutes 6 seconds PCR by 2 minutes 6 seconds

11 Christopher Toomer (So.) - 19:58.7 [(1) 6:01, (2) 6:27, (3.1) 7:31] SB by 19 seconds PCR by 19 seconds

16 Ian Parsons (So.) - 20:47.4 [(1) 6:08, (2) 6:43, (3.1) 7:57]

Nick bounced back very nicely and was right around where I figured he could be this season based on his performance in workouts. I'm excited to see what the next two years has in store for him.

Jayden and Sayid both ran nice PRs and both Dawson and Christopher knocked a third of a minute off their times from last week; getting a chance to see the course last week helped them know how to attack the course better this week. It's difficult to perform well on a brand new course you've never seen before and don't get to walk. Gavin and Ian both ran times close to where they were last week. All in all, this was a fantastic showing for us to close the fall season.

Team Results

1. DeMatha 20 points

2. St. John's 53 points

3. Georgetown Prep 54 points

4. Bishop Ireton 114 points

5. Bishop McNamara 124 points

There was one Unattached athlete in the results (Jack Sullivan) who I couldn't track down to find out which school he belonged to, but that would only potentially increase the scores for Ireton and McNamara. Regardless, we kicked butt today. Five of the top seven finishers (four of the top five) gave us and even better team score than we had last week when we raced The Heights, Ireton, and Good Counsel.

We should feel very good about what we've accomplished this season and the success we've set ourselves up to have in the future. The key will be to not get complacent. We can claim a title all we want, a la UCF in 2017, but we don't have any hardware to back it up yet so we have to be ready to grind again next season. "Play like you're first, train like you're second," as Stephen Curry says.

In any case, fantastic job today guys! You should be very proud of yourselves; I know I am.

Final Thoughts

Thank you, once again, to everybody for your support and dedication through this summer and fall. We met these challenging circumstances head-on and I couldn't be more grateful for, or more proud of, the team we have.

Thank you to our seniors, and in particular to Gavin Foran, Jaiden Mosley, and James Hudson for their leadership this season, showing up to practice every day, reaching out to their teammates to encourage them to train, and leading both with their words and with their actions. I've been blessed over the past four years with some excellent senior captains, and every year I feel our captains are better than the last group; not because of any deficiencies in the previous group, but because they learn from those leaders and then bring their own personality and skills to the job. I suspect the leadership these three gave us will be reflected in yet another outstanding group of senior leaders next year.

I hope we may get a chance to compete for a conference title later this school year, and I encourage all of you who are not playing other sports but would be interested in participating to continue running. Take a couple weeks off and then run two or three days a week to keep your running legs under you. If this does end up being it for the year, that will also get you ready to go for next year's summer training. I hope circumstances change by then to allow us to train together through the summer in 2021.

Congratulations to all of you on your hard work! We had a good race last week. We had a great race today!

Be safe! I wish you all good luck with school as we continue through the second quarter. I hope you all have a wonderful holiday season. Those of you who are running track, I hope to be out there in the near future and I will see you then. To the rest of you, good luck in whatever athletic, musical, or other activities you will be participating in through the rest of this year. I will see you all again soon!

If you run, you are a runner. It doesn't matter how fast or how far. It doesn't matter if today is your first day or if you've been running for 20 years. There is no test to pass, no license to earn, no membership card to get. You just run." - John Bingham