D.C. EVEREST INVITATIONAL
It was a near perfect day, 65 and sunny. The air was filled with a thin haze of smoke from a forest fire in northern Minnesota resulting in an air quality warning for parts of our state. Fortunately the air had cleared by race time and conditions were good. We entered the meet ranked 3rd in the state and with Everest ranked 4th as we faced off for the 2nd time in 4 days. The course was extremely dry, hard, and maybe a little more rutted up than usual.
Our junior high guys ran extremely well. With our number one runner from Saturday (Sam Smith) out with a sinus infection we needed guys to respond to the challenge and they did. This course is tougher than ours and yet most of our guys ran as fast as or faster than last Saturday. Thimmesch and Brady K. did a great job of running down the lead pack and even held the lead for a while in the last quarter. Kinney had a great race. He went out hard, took our pack with him, and led us to the team title. We have never placed 8 runners in the top 20 at this meet. In a field of 196 runners it’s tough to do. A lot of our guys ran well but I was especially impressed by Fisher, Menningen, and Hiess. Today we faced almost all of the teams we will see at our conference meet so the victory looks like a sign of good things to come.
The J.V. race was one of mixed results. Our lead group ran very well. Hansen led from the start and did a great job setting the pace. Guys who went with him were rewarded with P.R.s and in 3 cases, varsity spots. Byers, Hansen, and Weisbrod will move up to varsity this Saturday and Hatton was within 3 seconds of doing the same. Scott, Wallace, Krutza, Martinez, Tanko, Negaard, and Simkowski ran well and finished either at or under their times from the SPASH meet. Unfortunately quite a few of our guys never really got involved in the race. Maybe it was the fact that it was a weekday meet, or maybe we weren’t quite as excited as we had been last Saturday, but overall we didn’t run as well as we should have. Our two seniors, Hansen and Byers, gave a good lesson on getting ready to race and I hope our younger guys were paying attention.
The varsity race was another good matchup with Everest. Two of their better runners are out with injuries so our job became much easier. They ran even with us at 1 and 2, we gained a little at 3 and 4, and picked up 8 points at number 5. In a bigger meet our margin of victory would have been wider, but clearly this was not their full lineup.
Larson had another very strong effort, Anderson ran one of the best times by a sophomore on this course (Larson ran 16:37 last year to win), Hodsdon had his best race to date, and Sheibley and Cruz did what they needed to do to help us win. L.B. had a good effort considering he ran the last mile on a slightly sprained ankle. Fortunately it was our only injury on what I think of as the worst footing we see on any course.
This is our 11th consecutive title at this meet and our 31st in the last 34 years. Our average time of 16:53 is 6 seconds faster than last year’s average and one of our best ever on this course. Only our 2007 and 2008 teams have averaged faster since they moved the meet to the Nine Mile Forest. Larson’s 16:15 is the 3rd fastest at this meet, on this course, (you guessed it, Solinsky 15:42 in ‘01 and 15:20 in ‘02) and certainly one of the fastest ever run here. He also became the 20th SPASH runner to win this meet and the 4th to win it twice. Skorseth 1977, 78, Milkowski 1987, 88 and Solinsky 2000, 01 & 02.