10/14 News and Notes

The Week in Review

Given all of the Homecoming events, we took Friday and Saturday off, but that certainly didn't keep most of our team from getting together before the dance.

Coming off of three races in ten days, the last week was fairly short and simple.  At school things were definitely full of Homecoming festivities, but with no races or pasta parties, our team got a bit of a break.  

We did hold our first race-pace workout in several weeks.  As we approach the end of the season, paces will shift from date times (roughly what athletes have been running in races) to goal times (where they would like to be in our final races).  Our first taste of these paces was therefore a bit of a stretch, but even on a fairly warm day, our runners rose to the occasion and showed there can be some fast races ahead.

Thursday we rounded out our week with some POP-ular balloon games.  Our girls defeated the boys in the caterpillar race, where each team had to navigate a course of cones while keeping balloons between all of their bodies.  Than in dragon, teams tried to pop the balloon "tails' of other teams before they met the same fate.  

Schedule Change

Due to some unforeseen circumstances, our team won't be able to race at the Northwest Meet.  Thankfully we were able to find an alternative meet the following day at North County.  Given the later date and different terrain, we are going to keep all of our girls in the Conference race.  But most of our less experienced boys will still get a chance for one more race.  

The Week Ahead

This week we get back to racing.  We'll see another race pace workout on Tuesday.  After some more race-themed fun on Wednesday, we'll close out the week preparing for our Conference Meet.  That includes our second to last pasta party on Thursday.

Conference Meet Preview

Our conference is one of the tougher ones in the state.  Besides ourselves and Perryville, the Jefferson County Athletic Association lives up to its name, featuring entirely schools within that county.  In the past those schools were fairly balanced between large and small.  At the top are Festus and Hillsboro, the two most recent champions on the boys side in Class 4.  In fact, you have to go back 10 years to find a season where one of these two did not win a state title.  The Festus girls have also been on the podium at state four times in that span, where they've been joined by Desoto twice.  

Class 3 powerhouse Herculaneum is also in the mix, with a boys team that has been on the podium eight times in the last decade.  The Herky girls aren't what they used to be, but they've still brought home a state trophy four times in that span.  Besides a Perryville boys team ranked in the top 20 in Class 4, Windsor rounds out the large schools.  They've never seen much team success, but from time to time they still produce some high-quality individuals.  

That still leaves three small schools besides ourselves, but with St. Pius out of the Conference, those that remain lack the numbers or talent to be competitive.  For both boys and girls, only Jefferson has at least five runners.  That makes it tough for a school like us, a baby shark in a large pond.  Our teams can't really compete with the big dogs, and Crystal City and Grandview don't really have a dog in the fight. 

None of that is to mention that not one of the scoring teams from our girls district and only Jefferson from the boys are in the Conference.  I would much prefer a different conference, but unfortunately that isn't an option.  And so we'll take the best outlook possible:  we don't get to race against our district competition.  We get to compete against even better schools, and maybe that will make us better come districts.  

The Conference course at Festus's Larry Crites Park underwent some changes several years ago.  While that eliminated a pretty rough section of running, it came at the cost of a more repetitive and thus confusing course.  The race now starts across the road from the finish line and makes a quick loop around the edge of the lake and back behind the starting line.  That leads to the wooded portion that runners will traverse three times during the race.  The end of the first of the passes brings the race to the one-mile mark.  The course loops around parallel to the park trail before the runners take the wooded path a second time.  

At the end of the second pass runners enter the back field and follow along the tree line as the course slowly descends.  The turn back to the front field brings runners up a short but nonetheless steep and unstable hill.  A long straightaway takes the course back around the lake as they pass the two-mile marker.  From there the course heads around the lake to the wooded stretch one last time, but the final pass will be backwards relative to the first.  

Once the race emerges on the other side, it heads across the road and along the treeline behind tent city before doubling back into the finish.  All in all in ideal conditions, the course is reasonably fast, though it is certainly no Arcadia Valley.  

Festus also hosts a regular season meet that we used to participate in, but we will keep the following conversation to Conference races only.  The meet record on the boys side was set just two years ago by Festus's own Ian Schram with a time of 15:54.  However, Festus has two boys who have run faster 5K times than that this year.  In particular I would expect junior Carson Driemeier to make a serious challenge.  He ran a 16:14 on a very toasty day on the course last month.  As the defending champion, he brings the fastest returning time from last year at 16:11 as well as the fastest seed time at 15:05.

In terms of our team, Levi Krauss ran a 17:18 on the old course back in 2015.  On the new course, Jackson Unterreiner ran a 17:45 in 2022.  

For the girls, the meet record on the new course belongs to Perryville's Tegan Bishop with a time of 19:53 back in 2022.  The fastest returning time is defending champion Kendall Counts, a sophomore from Festus who won last year in 20:14.  However, it is a different Festus sophomore, Lucy Boyer, who seems the biggest threat to the record.  Her time of 18:59 on the ever insanely speedy Chili Pepper course is the fastest seed time.  

Corin Carroll ran the fastest time on the old course for our team with her 21:32 back in 2015.  On what I'm pretty sure was the new course, Anna Schwartz ran a 22:40 back in 2021.  

With cooler weather in the forecast, I'm excited to see some of the fastest times of the year so far!