One Long Run

Today we returned from our time trial with our first long run of the season. Our top group consisted of Nick, Matt, Sully, and myself. We did an 80 run east on Ladue. Sully was a champ and left most of the complaining to Matt, who made sure we all knew how tired he was. Coach Tom paced us perfectly getting us to Reed School, our desired location, at exactly 40 minutes. We were joined on our run today by alumni and blogmaster Kabes, who was the only person besides Tom that had ever run as far as Reed School. Tom gloated about being able to push us farther and harder than Coach Rob was ever able to last year. Hopefully all these practices running with Coach Tom will pay off when we get to the races later this month.

 

Matt survived the run in case you were wondering and we ended up putting in 11 1/2 miles today. Good work boys! The new meet schedule has been published on the De Smet Cross Country website for all former alumni and De Smet supporters who want to come and cheer us on this season. Your attendance is greatly supported by the team. Speaking of alumni...the alumni run is this Saturday August 13th at 9:00 at De Smet. There will be both a 1 mile race and a 2 mile race. I'm sure the alumni will be out in full force and I'll make sure to update the blog about all the excitement of the day. After practice today, Coach met with the varsity to talk about our practice schedule for the season. Seeing how much time and effort Coach Traughber puts into maximizing the performance of his runner is always impressive and motivating for us.

 

Moving on to much more important matters, today was the annual pool party at Coach Boland's house!! It's hard to put into words how much fun we have each year so I'll try to just touch on the finner aspects of the afternoon. I arrived late after taking an ice bath and I almost missed the classic pool relay races of varsity vs. jv. Kevin, Matt, Nick Trunko (our secret recruit) and myself faced off against Patrick Callahan, Potter, Morris, and Tim Pickel. After winning the freestyle relay the j.v. took the breast stroke relay. This set up a great final with myself just beating out Patrick to take the medley relay. Wow, what a great race! After the swim races Kevin and I faced off against Sully and Michael Callahan in an epic game of washers. After being down 5-1 Kevin and I surged back to win 8-6. We celebrated with running cannonballs into the pool.

 

Finally, we decided to start a new game this year of water football. Hebda, myself, Beers, and Glenn faced off against MC, Sully, and Husmann. We got whipped 5-1...Ouch! After the game we decided to switch up the teams with a draft. MC and myself were captains and I ended up with Husmann, Hebda, and Beers, while MC took Glenn, Sully, and Nick Trunko. Wow, what a game! Tied 4-4 MC threw a touchdown pass to Sully to win the game just as time expired. M.V.Ps of the game were Glenn with 2 picks and a couple of nice catches at wide receiver and tight end Sully who was dangerous in the red zone with a couple of touchdown grabs. Overall, it was a great day and we had lots of fun.

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!

A New Beginning

Welcome Back! I am excited to announce that Kabes has added I, John Waller, as a new Blogmaster to help you readers stay updated on current events for the 2011 Cross Country Season. This season is sure to be an exciting one as we began our journey today towards helping the Varsity team return to the State Championship for the 17th straight year.

The team returns three varsity runners including Matt O'Connor, Nick Martini, and myself. We unfortunately will have to say goodbye to four teammates (Kevin Abernathy, Jacob Seiler, John Madey, and Brian Scherping) who will be moving on to college this fall. Kevin will continue his running career this fall at Drury University and Brian will run for Missouri S&T, where he will join former high school running legend Bill Gabler. All four will be dearly missed along with former Blogmaster and track star Alex Potter. We wish them the best of luck as they begin their college years.

Moving on...We are excited to announce two new additions to our coach staff this year. They are Tom Albes and Jordan Mahood who are both De Smet alumni from the class of 2007. Both were excellent runners and their running skills and knowledge will greatly benefit our team this year.

Today at practice we were joined at practice by Kevin and Brian. Brian was just finishing his six miles of continuous tempos as we started practice and Kevin joined us for a classic double Mosely. Coach Tom and Kevin spent most of the running arguing about who had a more prestigous grade school sports career, as Nick and I timed how long Kevin would talk without taking a breather. Kevin reminded Tom of his three CYC volleyball championship, while Tom chimed back with his CYC soccer championship and his 4x800 school record at the track state championship.

All in all, it was a great run to start the season and I hope you'll enjoy this post after taking the summer off. Stay tuned for lots of good posts coming your way this week including goodbye posts from the class of 2011 and inductions into the 2011 Milktable Hall of Fame.