A Test of Strength

Today was the classic mile time trial that usually kicks of the start of the cross county season. Coach pushed the date back to today because of absences from seniors Nick Martini and Matt O'Connor who were helping out with the freshmen Odyssey Retreat (how nice of them!). I'm sure the other runners were as excited as me to finally put all of our hard work this summer to practice, and to allow us to measure how much we had improved from last season. After the warmup, stretching, and two laps of ins-and-outs the JV runners laced up their spikes to compete on the track, while myself and the other varsity runners ran to our lockers and cars to retrieve our spikes.

The JV runners took advantage of the cooler weather to turn in great performances. Among the notables were sophomore Nick Trunko, Josh Pribe (boy-genius), and Nick Martini's Oakville buddy Eric Paitchek, or something like that. Anyway, what the JV lacks in sheer numbers this year is made up for by their better than normal performances. Moving onto the Varsity....

Coach Albes helped pace us for our mile today by trying to lead the pack to four 75 second laps, (5:00) pace. However true, I decided to be my usual stubborn self and push the pace for the first two laps so that I could open a lead over my varsity teammates. My early pushed ended up paying off and I finished first at 4 minutes and 50 seconds. Coach Albes realized that he would have to increase his pace to keep up with me. He made a wonderful move at the homestretch of lap two to blow by me and help pace me for my final two laps. I tried my best to keep up with Coach, but I lost him on the final 200 and he finished with an impressive 4:45. Enough about myself...I'm starting to sound like Kevin.

My comprade Nick Martini also broke 5 and finished with a 4:57, while wearing Matt's shoes. Matt finished close behind him at 5:01. Most importantly the Junior wolfpack (Sullivan, Callahan, Potter, Husmann) finished right behind us in thr 5:10 range. Excellent job boys! After practice I realized that we have 12-15 runners all in the 5:15 or lower range. This means that even though we don't have a dynamic top runner this year, we are a much deeper team than usual so watch out!

After practice we celebrated with a breakfeast at our favorite restauraunt, Firstwatch. We were joined by alumni Kevin Abernathy and Alex Potter. It's always a pleasure to hang out with them and talk about running, Cardinals baseball, and other fun topics. In closing, alumni Brian Scherping was also spotted in the vacinity running laps in the outer lanes and chatting it up with track standout Austin del Roso, who showed up early for his soccer tryout to watch us run. He's a good kid that we all hope gets cut from soccer so that he can run with us. Senior and track star Tim Pickel impressed me today with a 5:30 time trial on virtually no traning. I feel like he could contribute to our Varsity team by the end of the season if he can get into 5k shape. Finally, I'm excited to announce that Glenn McGann has been nominated as our N.B.A. insider and will help keep fans updated during the lockout. Stay tuned more new posts and thanks for reading!