Saturday, October 17, 2009

More great races on another nasty course

Today was the Wisconsin State Private Schools championship. Both men's and women's squads did great, except for the fact that a lot of people are out with injuries. For those who ran there were PR's almost all around. A few people even managed to drop as much as 2 minutes. I struggled to keep up with Jon and Pfeuffer but was ultimately unable to do so, instead watching them tear away across the top of the "mountain" at Ripon College while I played leapfrog with the MSOE guys for 5 miles. I caught up to Danny mid way through the race and he gave some encouragement, but I ended up dying later on and he left me behind. I'm not yet sure what my official time was but I may have PR'd by a few seconds. Jon shaved a minute and a half from last week, running somewhere around 28:11, and Pfeuffer made the last spot on the all-time list with his 28:03. Tyler, Mike, Ben, and Andrew all finished one after the other and Ash won the thing in 25:35. As a team the guys managed 3rd place, getting beat out by Ripon and St. Norbert. The good news is that we beat all the schools in our conference, so two weeks from now it looks like we could take the championship. The ladies took 4th, and Guppy was second overall. The monster award for this week definitely goes to Jungers, however, as he was able to knock off about 2 minutes from his previous best.

The weather was a little bit chilly (40 degrees?) but not too bad. The black team sleeves kept my arms cozy as we ran laps at the top of the hill (bit of a breeze up there). The course, however, was somewhat of a nightmare in my opinion. The start consisted of a hard right almost immediately after the gun, and some moron put a blue flag directly to the left of the actual right-turn flag. This caused a bunch of the leaders to nearly miss the turn because they aimed for the blue flag instead of the yellow one. After that we climbed to the top of the hill, ran a couple of loops up there, and then branched off into the forest for a steep, winding downhill towards the finish. This descent caught me completely off guard and almost sent me hurtling over one of the edges into the woods. I also came very close to going down right in front of Richard, who was taking pictures at the bottom. My knee started to give out and he snapped a photo of me flailing my arms in a near-panic. As much as the downhill sucked, though, it helped people run fast. This, combined with the fact that the last mile was short (balanced by 4 other miles that were slightly long) led to many of us running around 4:40 for the last "mile." The finish was also terrible. The chute was essentially in the middle of a parking lot.

It was a good day though. Next week is off (fall break), then conference, followed by the President's Run and Regionals. It's time to make things happen.

1 comment: