Sometimes we have days where the right breakfast was eaten, shoes were tied right, and our breathing was on point! Seemed to be the case for the Cougar-Falcon Invitational at Gainey Field. A meet that has had extreme weather through the years, either raining all day or progressively hot. We took advantage of the plenty of competition and cooler temperatures to have great times all across the board. The boys only raced 5 due to sickness from some of their teammates. We’re happy to see Charles Brooks hit an awesome PR, 17:59, before he was dealing with an injury and just trying to get into the low 18 minute range! Andrew Badjek didn’t follow too far behind while he ran a huge PR, 18:20! Sophomore Evan Murphy used his competition to his advantage and hit a PR of 20:30 to be third for varsity! Also racing again was Hilib Kuzmenko, and for joining the sport recently, ran a 22:05 and had a great finish on just pure will to do so! While Noah Ysasi and Michael Roche may have not hit a personal record on the day, they both were close to it, and as freshman they are building their experience up which is what you need in a sport like this. Experience at feeling pain and discomfort through and through. But more experience and training makes the faster times feel a little more tolerable, even though it should always feel hard at the end of the race!

We are proud of how the team showed up. As Coach Duba says it best, “we should be peaking mid season” and building up after that. It is basically mid-season and seeing a race like that excites both coaches on what is to come! So this week brings one race on Saturday, the Fruitport Invitational. This course is fresh in our minds. We just ran our first conference race there. There should be no reason why we all can’t improve our times from the last one there! A full week of practice, with only one race, a familiar course coming up, off the heels of a great race Saturday, feels like a recipe for success! 

What the rest of the season looks like is each practice is important, not only for keeping our fitness up, but staying healthy! We can have meets like we did on Saturday every time, if we don’t underestimate our workout days, easy days, stretching, and other core and racing routines. It is all significant to our success as a runner! It requires us to remain focused and never lose sight of our goals we made for ourselves at the beginning of the season! But we’ll celebrate a great showing on Saturday as well! Great work Falcons!