Monday, June 22, 2009

Well, the season has finally come to a close and in a dramatic one none-the-less. The girls closed the season with a 10th place finish at the state meet in the 4x800 and the boys finished on a high note with one state qualifier and a boat load of pr's.

On the girls side of things we qualified for the state meet in the 4x800 running a season best of 10:02 to finish second at the sectional meet. Emily Gustafson, who was sick at the time, then came back to win the 1600. Our time coming into the meet placed us 16th overall but I knew the girls had at least 10 seconds to drop once they got into the heat of competition, and they did just that. Freshman stud Autumn Andrews who was running only her third race of the year due to an on going foot injury lead of with a monster first leg of 2:21, handing off in the lead! Rookie Rachel Innes then held her ground running 2:29 and maintained our first position to hand off to the other sophmore Ashley Schmitt. Ashely ran for her life and kept the stick in the top seven, running her fastest leg of the year clocking 2:35. Veteran Emily Gustafson moved up 3 positions over the last lap to crush our season best running 9:49 and qualifying for the finals by 1 place!

The finals went as expected for the relay, other than Autumn Andrews running 2:21 to hand off in first place. Innes and Schmitt held on to tie their pbs from the day before and Emily Gustafson got the baton just a bit to far behind to get us back in medal contention. They did run another season best and the second fastest time in school history of 9:48. Although they were a little bummed that they missed a medal by one place, I think that they know in their hearts that they ran as good as they could have. Hopefully it will be motivation to train like crazy this summer ; )

Emily Gustafson came back off the relay to win her heat of the 1600, running 5:16. The final did not go quite as planned as she is still learning how to run a championship type mile. There was a lot of bumping and when the pace picked up at the 800 she never really responded. She still hung on for a 7th place finish which was good enough for her first All State medal!

On the boys side of things Hugh Gill was the suprise of the year. He ran a personal best of 4:28 to qualify for the state meet! We knew he was in sub 4:30 shape it was just a matter of being in the right race on the right day. Coming into the state meet he was seeded 20th out of 30 and top 12 make the finals. We drew heat 1 and the only advise I could give him was pin your ears back and run with the leaders, and he did just that. He finished 4th in his heat in a time of 4:29 to sneak into the finals with the last time! The finals went pretty much as planned and our plan was to stay in the back for 800 and then get into medal position at some point so we could at least say we went for it. Hugh managed to get into 8th place but with 300 to go two kids got around him and he ran a hard fought 10th place, one spot from the podium : ( But I believe it is a great way to finish off a hard earned season and build into the last summer of his high school career. More importantly it brings a new level of commitment to the team and there has been such a remarkable shift in attitude with this group over the last 9 months.

That is the short story long folks. I just finished up with a long week of helping make the Steamboat Classic a world class event. I havent been to bed before 1 am for the last week so I am looking forward to a few days of peace and quiet. I did a little running with the boys last week, their first real week of summer training. Im still grinding it out on the bike as well when I get mornings away from things. When I get results and stories from the race on practice Wednesday I will post them as I havent gotten a chance to talk to any of the boys. I did see that most of them ran really well, especially the ones that ran the 15k!

Go Raiders!