Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Back from Griak

I am having computer problems ( my hard drive is shot) so posting will be light for a while.

The races were a lot of fun. It didn't rain during the day saturday but the course was pretty saturated already, The college races in the morning churned up the mud and several places looked like cattle crossings. Running through six inches of mud will take a bit off of anyone's time and the consensus is that the course ran about 30 seconds slow by the end of the afternoon. The results are up here :

http://www.gophersports.com/ViewArticle.dbml?SPSID=45840&SPID=3297&DB_OEM_ID=8400&ATCLID=612384

I won't go through all of the numbers here, just a few highlights. Dennis and kevin raced each other the last quarter mile w/ Dennis out leaning the frosh at the line. They were both in front of marquette's first runner and a few steps behind Sean Olson. David had another stellar performance as this is turning out to be his best season ever. Andrew and Brian struggled again. If they had run the same times that they did here last year we would have been third instead of 20th. Both should be able to recover by Conference. Sammy D. ran a PR and finally looked like he did last year. Christian gets a mention for throwing up in his sleeping bag.

Distinguished Alumni Alec Maduzza ran for Nebraska and finished five miles in 27:00.

The girls had another inspiring race. They ran very much together and it was fun to see them yelling encouragement to each other and exchanging high fives during the race. Becky suffered from bad shin splints and did well to finish; hopefully she will be back in form soon. Morgan led the team to ninth place; but the real story was Sarah who had a huge race. She looked like her old self for the first time this year. At this rate she could well be our number one runner by Conference. If the girl's times look slow it's because they rana 5K instead of the usual 4K.

There are some pictures up under the slide show link. Somehow the order of the slides got mixed up. I don't have time to sort them so they are in a somewhat random order. It's not a lame attempt at being artistic.

The next race is the Eagle invite at Parkside. This is the only course that we run twice, so this is where we measure how everyone is doing.

Once again the competition will be huge for this meet. I know I sound like a broken record with that line but keep in mind that just about every meet we run is an open or an invite which means that teams can choose whether or not to come right up until about the week before. For some reason this year a group of better teams have been running at the same events that we are at. This is not normal, but it will help us in the long run. Also keep in mind that we have been running against mostly top tier D1 schools. These guys are not in our section at State. The opposite of this will be the field at our own invite in two weeks which attracts mostly smaller programs and basketball teams.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

and football teams

Anonymous said...

Paul, Thanks for clarifying that the sequencing of the photos wasn't a lame attempt at artistry. I was spending way too much time pondering the hidden meanings in the juxtaposition of photos of different people running through the same mud in different directions. Now I can rest easy knowing there are no occult messages.
Larry

Dash said...

Larry,

I'm not sure you can rule out the occult that quickly. I still don't know how the images got scrambled, there could be a ghost in the software ... or a demon in my rapidly fading hard drive. After all the computer is from Dell.