2021 Gunpowder Falls Invitational

I'll tell you what, we had some great timing today, not only with our athletes' performances but with the weather. We hit a few pockets of rain on the return trip but the rain largely held off until we'd arrived back at DeMatha and unloaded the buses. Fr. James said on the Monday leading up to last Friday's groundbreaking ceremony that God listens to the prayers of the young and asked them to pray for no rain, and we got no rain, so I reiterated that message last night and it seems to have worked again.

Today's meet was a lot of fun. I had never seen this course before, thought it did remind me in some ways of the course we'll run next week at the Skip Grant Invitational, which will be held at the Agricultural Farm Park in Derwood, Md. The course was extremely spectator friendly, which was certainly good for Coach Hoke and me and all of the parents who made it out but was also great for the athletes because they had support from us and their teammates throughout the run. Maybe that factored into their performances and maybe it didn't; regardless, we had a lot of terrific performances today.

That doesn't always equate to PRs. Today's course was a tough one. We occasionally have meets where just about everybody sets a new PR. Two weeks ago we saw a whole lot of PRs and at the 2017 WCAC Championship 18 of 22 athletes set PRs. While I prefer to think more optimistically and take it to mean that everybody was at their best, it can be difficult not to wonder with those sorts of meets whether it was more about the course being easier. Well today we saw just about half of our athletes set PRs. What that says to me is that the course was fair but definitely not easy and that those of you who set PRs should be very proud and confident that you'll take even more time off two weeks from today at championships, especially if we get good course conditions.

For those who didn't set PRs, hopefully it was just a bad race and something you'll bounce back from next week. If it's something more, like fatigue, the good news is that we begin our taper this week and hopefully that will help to ensure you have fresh legs in two weeks to offset any possibility that you peaked too early.

I'm very proud of everyone's effort and am excited for our championship meet in two weeks. We'll get one more chance to make adjustments to our racing strategies next week, but before we get to that let's look through today's results. 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.

Fresh/Soph

Here are the results for our freshmen and sophomore non-varsity athletes (122 total entries in the race). The number in front of each name signifies their overall place in the Fresh/Soph race. In brackets are their first mile, second mile, and last 1.1 mile splits:

11 Hayden Walsh (Fr.) - 19:33.7 [(1) 5:59, (2) 6:31, (3.1) 7:04] PR by 9 seconds

18 William Jackson (Fr.) - 20:00.6 [(1) 6:13, (2) 6:33, (3.1) 7:15] PR by 12 seconds

97 Brendan Dougherty (Fr.) - 24:41.1 [(1) 7:32, (2) 8:16, (3.1) 8:53]

104 Peter Brown (So.) - 25:57.7 [(1) 7:26, (2) 8:48, (3.1) 9:44]

105 Andrew Righi (So.) - 26:05.3 [(1) 7:50, (2) 8:53, (3.1) 9:22]

115 Carter Leecost (Fr.) - 28:24.4 [(1) 8:52, (2) 9:43, (3.1) 9:49] PR by 1 minute 15 seconds

120 Anthony Bardonille (So.) - 30:33.3 [(1) 8:43, (2) 11:10, (3.1) 10:40]

These results are now official. While the places are official, the times above are, for now, my unofficial hand times which is why the PRs are approximations. Going through the results from today's timer, I found that all seven of our athletes' times were about 22.5 seconds faster in the results than my hand times were, and I know I didn't start my watch 20+ seconds after the gun. I've already emailed the meet director and timer and hopefully they'll find the issue, which I assume applied to all 122 athletes entered in this race. The same issue was not present in the varsity or open race results, so those ones below can be considered official.

Hayden and William both ran very well and William just missed out on breaking 20 minutes for the first time. He'll have an opportunity to do so next week on a course where I ran my second fastest 5k time as a high schooler at the MD-DC Private School State Championship my senior year.

Carter barely had to walk, if at all, today and he dropped a huge PR, breaking 29 minutes for the first time and by a large margin. He may not have the most talent on the team but he puts his best foot forward every day in practice and every Saturday in his races and I'm so excited to see his times continue to drop and reflect the hard work he's been putting in.

Brendan's last mile fell off a bit more than usual and accounted for him being just about 20 seconds off his PR. That's a fairly easy margin to recover and I know he's looking forward to next week's opportunity to bounce back. Andrew started off a bit slower in his first mile than he did at last week's parkrun and it looked like it took him a little while to lock into a rhythm. Peter did a good to back off his start a bit after having some trouble in the last two miles last week, but he may need to back off just a bit more on the early effort. He did take a few seconds off his parkrun time from last week, but was still more than 50 seconds off his PR from Arundel.

Anthony had a really bad cramp during the race it never really went away. He did a really good job to finish out the race, though, averaging a 9:43/mile pace in his closing 1.1 miles after running 11:10 for his second mile.

Team Results

1. Winston Churchill 38 points

2. Towson 76 points

3. Damascus 97 points

4. Walter Johnson 134 points

5. Spalding 140 points

...

12. DeMatha 285 points

...

15. Gaithersburg 385 points

Varsity

Here are the results for our varsity athletes (137 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:

13 Jayden Keels (Jr.) - 17:11.0 [(1) 5:14, (2) 5:44, (3.1) 6:13] PR by 13 seconds

19 Sayid Shakur (So.) - 17:29.1 [(1) 5:24, (2) 5:44, (3.1) 6:21] PR by 2 seconds

21 Christopher Toomer (Jr.) - 17:36.3 [(1) 5:38, (2) 5:47, (3.1) 6:11] PR by 31 seconds

28 Ian Parsons (Jr.) - 17:48.8 [(1) 5:27, (2) 5:50, (3.1) 6:32] PR by 33 seconds

44 Graham Fenn (So.) - 18:19.5 [(1) 5:44, (2) 5:59, (3.1) 6:37] PR by 6 seconds

59 Michael Metz (Jr.) - 18:47.8 [(1) 5:51, (2) 6:09, (3.1) 6:48]

88 Tariq Lewis (Sr.) - 19:36.5 [(1) 5:51, (2) 6:34, (3.1) 7:12]

Our five scoring finishers all PR'd today! That's a huge accomplishment considering the difficulty some of our other athletes had hitting their best times, not to mention the heat that was beginning to beat down on the course by the time this race began.

What's more, we had four athletes break 18 minutes! The last time that happened was my junior year, the fall of 2008, at the Georgetown Prep Classic (which was certainly run on a much less difficult course than the one we ran three weeks ago). That group consisted of myself [15:27, DeMatha's XC 5k record], senior Robert Patterson [15:48, #4 all-time for DeMatha (Robert and I are the only two athletes to break 16 minutes for DeMatha to the best of my knowledge*)], sophomore Onyx Johnson [17:16, #43 since at least 2000], and sophomore Grant Abernathy [17:39, #64 since at least 2000].

*I certainly hope that I won't be able to say this for much longer. I'm excited to see what Jayden can do over the next year and change and what Sayid can do over the next two. Not to count out anybody else, but they definitely have a shot to hit that sub-16 milestone before they graduate.

Here are the all-time DeMatha cross country rankings for those four times today:

• Jayden Keels - #39 for DeMatha since 2000, #15 for DeMatha juniors since 2000

• Sayid Shakur - #57 for DeMatha since 2000, #10 for DeMatha sophomores since 2000 and bumps his time from last week to #11 on this list

• Christopher Toomer - #64 for DeMatha since 2000

• Ian Parsons - #82 for DeMatha since 2000

Now those are where each of them ranks with today's time against all of the times that have been run for DeMatha, but what if you take only each DeMatha athlete's fastest time in the past 21 years? For example, rather than counting every time I ran a faster time than Jayden did today, and every time Robert Patterson did, etc., we only take my fastest, Robert's fastest, and so on. Then where do these four rank?

• Jayden Keels - #6 for DeMatha since 2000 [I have records of five other athletes beating Jayden's time from prior to 2000]

• Sayid Shakur - #12 for DeMatha since 2000 [I have records of ten other athletes beating or equaling Sayid's time from prior to 2000]

• Christopher Toomer - #14 for DeMatha since 2000 [I have records of 11 other athletes beating Christopher's time from prior to 2000]

• Ian Parsons - #21 for DeMatha since 2000 [I have records of 13 other athletes beating Ian's time from prior to 2000]

DeMatha now has exactly 25 cross country athletes since 2000 who have run 17:59 or faster in the 5k; that should give everyone an idea of just how special that milestone is. On average, just more than one per graduating class attains that and we have three juniors and a sophomore who have already hit that mark, plus another sophomore 20 seconds away and another junior 38 seconds away using Michael's PR from Arundel.

Jayden is well within striking distance of becoming the fifth DeMatha runner to break 16 minutes since 2000 and the eighth all-time (unless I am missing someone from prior to 2000 from my records, which is possible).

Team Results

1. Winston Churchill 33 points

2. Walter Johnson 94 points

3. Towson 119 points

4. DeMatha 124 points

5. Dulaney 138 points

6. Broadneck 145 points

7. Gaithersburg 166 points

8. Spalding 204 points

...

17. North Harford 472 points

To give an idea of how competitive this meet was from a team perspective, we remember how competitive Georgetown Prep was where we finished eighth and the Top 8 teams scores today were fairly similar. The Top 7 all actually scored fewer points today than at Prep. Obviously Winston Churchill is in a class of its own, but the next six teams behind them were all very strong competitors and we can be proud of our fourth place finish.

Of the six teams finishing between 2nd and 7th place:

• We had the lowest 1-5 spread at 1 minute 9 seconds; the next lowest was Towson at 1:23 and the highest was Dulaney at 2:45.

• We had the #5 average finish time at 17:42; the fastest average time Walter Johnson at 17:18 (of course, Churchill blew everyone out of the water with a 16:43 average) and the slowest was Gaitherburg at 17:54.

These sorts of metrics are interesting to look at, but as you can see they aren't necessarily all that predictive of placing. Our average finish time was fifth of those six teams but we finished third in that group, ahead of the two teams who had an average time one second faster than us.

Open

Here are the results for our junior and senior non-varsity athletes (110 total entries in the race). The number in front of each name signifies their overall place in the co-ed Open race. In brackets are their first mile, second mile, and last 1.1 mile splits:

19 Desmond Holt (Sr.) - 22:07.6 [(1) 6:18, (2) 7:30, (3.1) 8:20]

36 Austin Boynes (Sr.) - 23:32.0 [(1) 6:55, (2) 7:55, (3.1) 8:42] PR by 18 seconds

37 Jacob Robertson (Sr.) - 23:33.9 [(1) 6:53, (2) 7:57, (3.1) 8:44]

62 Maximo Legaspi (Jr.) - 25:19.1 [(1) 7:27, (2) 8:30, (3.1) 9:22] SB by 12 seconds

65 Jackson McCormick (Sr.) - 25:37.5 [(1) 6:51, (2) 9:10, (3.1) 9:37]

104 Ian Brown (Sr.) - 29:51.2 [(1) 7:48, (2) 10:33, (3.1) 11:30]

109 Jaquada Moses (Jr.) - 31:49.3 [(1) 8:29, (2) 11:01, (3.1) 12:19]

Congrats to Austin on another great PR, his third in a row! At this rate he could definitely break 23 minutes at championships, which would be a terrific accomplishment. Jacob was less than 10 seconds off his season best from two weeks ago and is still within 30 seconds of his PR. Hopefully some fresh legs at the next two weeks will do the trick because I know he'd love to break 23 minutes, as well.

Desmond's last three races have been fairly consistent, all within 15 seconds of each other. His career PR is a little ways out there, but I would love to see him at least his his season best from last year, which was 21:40.

Maximo ran great today! Honestly I was a little surprised that he set his season best by only 12 seconds, but then I remembered that I haven't actually watched him race in three weeks. He didn't run at Arundel and I ran in last week's parkrun so I only saw his finish and wasn't looking at a clock while cheering him in. He's about 45 seconds away from his PR set at championships his freshman year and I would love to see him get it before this season ends.

Jackson caught a bit of a cramp and both Ian and Jaquada struggled through today's races but did a great job to finish. They've all run much better races than they did today and hopefully they feel confident in their ability to bounce back; I know I do.

There were no team scores for the open race.

Final Thoughts

Great work today, gentlemen. Every week you step up to the plate and you make me, Coach Hoke, and Coach Anthony proud to be your coaches. I know Coach Anthony missed being with us while he was out of town this week and will be excited to see all at practice this week after another great race.

It's now time for our final push to championships. We will get our last full-volume quality workout in on Monday and then begin tapering. Our intensity and effort in practice will not change from what we've been doing all season, but the volume (the number of reps, the amount of time we run, etc) will decrease. We have to keep the intensity up to make sure our bodies don't forget how to run at the paces we need to be at on race day. But we decrease the volume to prevent injuries and to help our legs to feel less fatigued for the most important races of the year.

It's especially important that we focus on injury prevention through these final two weeks (or four weeks for the many of you who are continuing on to the Private School State Championship). Injuries at any time of the season are frustrating, especially when they force you to miss important workouts that you can't really make up. But in this final stretch of the season, injuries can mean missing the one race we've been working so hard for all season.

We've had some freak injuries in the past leading into championships, and I feel horrible for those athletes but there's little we can do to prevent those beyond not letting our concentration lapse during runs, and even then some freak accidents are entirely out of our control. But one thing we've done a great job of since and before I took over as the coach has been avoiding overuse injuries with athletes' bodies breaking down because they're overworked. Don't take the decrease in volume during practice as an invitation to do more on your own.

And to be crystal clear, this isn't only about risk-management. While training harder over these next two weeks could absolutely have a benefit at the Private School State Championship, it will have no benefit at all for WCACs and that's the race we care most about and it's the race where you're most likely to run a PR anyway given the two courses' difficulties. Remember that it takes, on average, 10-14 days for an anaerobic workout to have a benefit on a race, which is why we don't taper the Monday workout (12 days out) and we do a mild taper on Wednesday's workout (10 days out). After that, nothing you do with your anaerobic system is going to benefit your performance at WCACs, the only reason we even do those workouts after Wednesday is maintain your body's ability to run at that pace.

This is the time to avoid certain physical activities outside of cross country. Basketball with friends has already been a risk, but a turned ankle or some other, likely minor, injury could be recovered from by championships. Now we're in the time frame where it just as easily could force you to miss it.

I'll also go ahead and give you all a heads up now (and a stern reminder next week) than nobody is permitted to attend the DeMatha vs Roman Catholic football game on October 29. It's the night before our championship and you need to get as much rest as possible in preparation for your race. Going out that night lets down yourself and your teammates. I have to be there because I broadcast the game and Coach Anthony will be there because he works at the Complex. If either of us sees you at that game, we'll let you on the bus Saturday morning but you won't get a bib, you won't get a chip, you won't be permitted to race, and you'll forfeit your varsity or JV letter for the season as it will be considered an unexcused absence from the race.

You all have done a great job all season of encouraging each other, building each other up, keeping each other accountable, and working your tails off. Let's keep that energy through this final push!

"Push yourself again and again. Don't give an inch until the final buzzer sounds." - Larry Bird