Getting small victories along the way is how one stays motivated through the season. With meets springing up all over, more and more teams are opting to travel outside the ‘Association’. With a team that is “developing”, I have to say, it’s been good for us. This weekend, meets at the Armory and Ocean Breeze in NYC, Kevin Dare out in State College and the Ursinus Invite left things wide open here at ‘home’.
Our distance relays benefited for the second week as the DMR finished 2nd which auto-qualifies for MOC. Last week the 4×8 got in the same way. Now we need to get those times down!
After crashing into the first hurdle last week, Coach Garis made Christian McCarry ‘get right back on the horse’ this week. Chris responded with a PR win in 8.73. (8.65 gets him to States.)
This week at practice, we stressed pacing rather than racing in an attempt to get the distance runners to hit goal times. It seems to be paying off. Zac Dallal is two for two in the PR department as he followed up last week’s 2:07 800 with a 4:46.75PR third place finish at the mile. He stuck to his splits of 35-36 sec throughout the race as planned.
Other medalists were the 4×2 and Josh Chaiken at 3000, both in 3rd.
One big ‘Attaboy’ goes to Reed Possoff who’d been stuck around 6:00 for the mile like forever. (His PR of 5:59.56 coming almost a year ago at Ocean Breeze). Again, sticking to the race plan, he chopped off a big 8.4 second chunk splitting 5:51.16 anchoring the Novice DMR.
60HH – McCarry 8.99/8.73PR 1st place
200M – Dan Yang 26.33 14th place
400M – Steve Reilly 63.86 23rd place
800M – Doug Hoyer 2:24.53 11th place
Mile – Zac Dallal 4:46.75PR 3rd place Solomon Thistle 5:00.08 8th place
3000M – Josh Chaiken 10:02.15 3rd place
DMR – 11:46.93 2nd place (Caymus Ruffner 3:36.52, Adam Grossberg 57.56, Mike Cimini 2:15.62, Hanson Leung 4:57.23)
4×2 – 1:40.53 3rd place (Robert Wilson 24.70, Brett Lehman 24.85, Shawn Carr 25.45, Mark Futch 25.53)
Novice DMR – 14:02.29 13th place (Dean DiGiovanni 4:13.65, Aiden Kennedy 62.50, Zack Wolf 2:54.96, Possoff 5:51.16PR)
Long Jump – Taraji Ellington 15-2.5 9th place