2026 College Park parkrun #1

Despite some rain clouds rolling through as we arrived, we made it through warmups and were treated to really nice conditions for the race. The racing surface was a little bit slick in spots but overall seemed to hold up quite well for our first race of the season.

This weekend was also special for the College Park parkrun. This was the 450th time they've hosted the event -- they had an extended hiatus during Covid or that number would likely be approaching or have surpassed 500 by now. They've always been gracious hosts when we show up, so it was a nice treat to be part of that celebration. When we attend again in October for our pre-WCAC tune-up, it'll be right around the parkrun's 10th birthday!

Let's jump right into things. As usual, I have marked in blue all athletes who set a new PR (personal record) in the cross country 5k at the parkrun. For athletes who have run this event before with us, in silver I have noted all athletes who set a new PCB (personal course best) for the Paint Branch Trail out-and-back 5k course.

Many of our athletes ran in our kickoff time trial a week and a half ago. While the distance for that event was not official (and may have been a tenth of a mile long or so), it gives us a good sense of how much a single exposure to the distance can make for our athletes. First-year runners set their first PR, so the markings I explained in the last paragraph won't appear for them. Instead, for those athletes only, I am including in red the improvement they made from the estimated 5k conversion of their time trial to this weekend's parkrun.

Open Race

Here are the results for all of our athletes (192 total entries in the run -- and though they are not in our results, I was thrilled to see several parents on the course!). The number in front of each name signifies their overall place in the race. In brackets are their first mile, middle 1.1 mile, and last mile splits:

4 Lucas Moisiuk (Jr) - 18:35 [(1) 5:44, (2.1) 6:50, (3.1) 6:01] PCB by 24 seconds
8 Evan Bouchard (Fr) - 19:16 [(1) 5:52, (2.1) 7:14, (3.1) 6:10] Improvement of ~1 minutes 41 seconds
9 Satchel Drabinski (So) - 19:17 [(1) 5:50, (2.1) 7:10, (3.1) 6:17] PR by 1 minute 24 seconds PCB by 1 minute 32 seconds
15 Alexander Soto (Jr) - 20:55 [(1) 6:25, (2.1) 7:53, (3.1) 6:37]
16 Fareed Rahi (So) - 20:57 [(1) 6:34, (2.1) 7:44, (3.1) 6:39]
20 Blake Inzeo (So) - 21:37 [(1) 7:01, (2.1) 7:45, (3.1) 6:51] Improvement of ~3 minutes 26 seconds
26 Michael Bridges (So) - 22:52 [(1) 6:56, (2.1) 8:36, (3.1) 7:20]
27 Zahir Accilien (So) - 23:04 [(1) 7:04, (2.1) 8:29, (3.1) 7:31]
31 Dominic Hislop (So) - 23:56 [(1) 7:24, (2.1) 9:07, (3.1) 7:25] Improvement of ~6 minutes 6 seconds
34 Dane Kuzner (Jr) - 24:05 [(1) 7:03, (2.1) 8:52, (3.1) 8:10]
36 Ryan Hickey (So) - 24:08 [(1) 7:35, (2.1) 8:57, (3.1) 7:36] PCB by 1 minute 40 seconds
39 John Tomas Felicio (Jr) - 24:36 [(1) 7:18, (2.1) 8:37, (3.1) 8:41]
42 Stavros Rodousakis (Jr) - 25:12 [(1) 7:18, (2.1) 9:11, (3.1) 8:43] PCB by 1 minute 37 seconds
45 Nathaniel Garvin Jr. (So) - 26:03 (HT*) [(1) 8:13, (2.1) 9:37, (3.1) 8:13]
47 Stephen Lawrence Jr. (So) - 26:14 (HT*) [(1) 8:13, (2.1) 9:38, (3.1) 8:23]
51 Caene Nartey (Fr) - 26:41 [(1) 8:28, (2.1) 9:52, (3.1) 8:21] Improvement of ~5 minutes 32 seconds
57 Sebastian Righi (So) - 27:03 [(1) 8:25, (2.1) 9:55, (3.1) 8:43] PR & PCB by 59 seconds
71 Nnamdi Onwuka (Fr) - 28:45 [(1) 8:18, (2.1) 10:53, (3.1) 9:34] Improvement of ~4 minutes 8 seconds
74 Terence Rascher (Jr) - 29:02 [(1) 8:15, (2.1) 11:02, (3.1) 9:45]
89 Luke Anthony Quach (So) - 30:46 [(1) 9:08, (2.1) 11:25, (3.1) 10:13]
94 Chase Osby (Sr) - 31:13 [(1) 9:05, (2.1) 11:46, (3.1) 10:22]
107 Emilio Chicas (Jr) - 33:16 [(1) 10:16, (2.1) 12:08, (3.1) 10:52]
133 William Dougherty (Fr) - 37:26 [(1) 10:37, (2.1) 13:20, (3.1) 13:29] Improvement of ~6 minutes 35 seconds
134 Miguel Guzman (So) - 37:26 [(1) 10:48, (2.1) 14:28, (3.1) 12:10]

We also had an alum from our 2022 WCAC Title team in the results from this weekend's parkrun. Congrats to him!

10 Ian Parsons '23 - 19:28 [(1) 5:47, (2.1) 7:17, (3.1) 6:24]

*Nate and Stephen do not appear in the parkrun results because neither returned to scan their barcodes with their finishing chips. Fortunately, Coach Anthony got hand times (HT) for both and I was able to match them to the "unknown" entries in the official results.

We had a lot of great results to celebrate. Evan Bouchard has been training hard since very early in the summer with us and is poised for a strong freshman campaign. While I don't officially track 5k results from out-of-season toward our athletes' PR progression, I do want to point out that this is a huge step forward for him from our visit to the parkrun six weeks ago. Evan ran 20:42 that day and cut nearly a minute and a half off that time this weekend.

Speaking of that mid-July parkrun, Luke Moisiuk, Blake Inzeo, and our alum Ian Parsons all ran both parkruns and all improved their performances. Luke took nearly a full minute off his time from July, Blake improved by nearly three minutes, and Ian took about two and a half minutes off his time. To be honest, I'm a little jealous I couldn't race this weekend and see if I could have shown similar improvement.

Satchel Drabinski is coming off a solid freshman season and worked very hard through the track season. With a full summer of solid training under his belt, he took a big step forward with a huge PR. While neither he nor Evan intended it going into the race, he wound up playing the role of pacemaker for Evan through the final mile of the race and deserves a lot of credit for being a great teammate in that regard.

Sebastian Righi has been among our more consistent athletes posting workouts to Strava this summer and his hard work showed up in a strong sophomore debut. Any day you can take a minute off your 5k time is a good day.

A couple other returning athletes deserve shoutouts this weekend. Ryan Hickey and Stav Rodousakis both ran big course bests and each was within 20 seconds of their PR from a season ago. I wouldn't be surprised at all if we see both of them PR when we run our next 5k in two weeks.

Among our first-year runners, there were a lot of standout performances. It's hard to measure improvement perfectly since I don't have an official distance measurement for our time trial, but those true first-timers all had huge improvements just from having experienced the distance once before. Caene, Nnamdi, and Will, our freshmen, all took big steps forward. Dominic Hislop has been getting runs in through the summer but needed the time trial to get a feel for the distance and took full advantage.

Miguel likely would have also had a similarly large improvement, but he only ran one and a half of the 2.5-lap course for our time trial. It was likely an honest mistake by a first-time runner and neither Coach Ant nor I realized it until after the fact.

Finally, shout out to our team captain Renaud Williams. He had a busy day that included taking the SAT Saturday morning, which some of our other seniors were also doing. But he made time Saturday evening to go out and run the parkrun course himself. The result is unofficial, but his time on Strava was 18:58 which would be a 52-second PR and the second fastest time on the team this weekend.

Final Thoughts

We still have a handful of athletes who I know are running this fall but have been unable to join us for practices due to transportation issues or being out of town. We were also missing about 10 athletes at this parkrun who have been at practice since we began on August 12. From those we had this weekend, though, I was pleased with what I saw.

We have some work still to do with many of our returners, but I'm excited to get a couple good weeks of training plus a shorter race in a fun atmosphere next Saturday before our next 5k. That will give those guys some time to continue re-acclimating to the routine and to the workouts.

One important thing I'll be talking about this week but want to preview here; it was brought to my attention that a few athletes tried to cut the course and turn around early but were caught and directed to the proper turnaround point. I don't know whether this was intentional or an honest mistake -- it wouldn't be the first time if it was the latter -- but I sometimes take for granted that our athletes know that races are for distance, not time as most of our runs are, and that they'll know to follow the course and the athletes in front of them. Some of our less experienced runners need a bit more coaching from me in that regard, so we'll take some time out for that at the end of one of our practices this week.