Ed White (Fox) Meet Recap

9/27/2025

This season we tried to schedule a few meets that would really challenge us. Most of the meets in our area tend to feature the same schools over and over. We wanted to find a bigger meet with unfamiliar yet talented schools, as this is what we would ultimately encounter if we qualify for state.

During this week of the season meets are actually pretty tough to find. The Gans Creek Classic is held on Saturday on the state course in Columbia and draws nearly 200 schools. Besides the sheer chaos of a meet that size falling the same weekend as Mizzou Homecoming, with races starting at 7:55AM and a home football game for our school the night before, making the three-hour trip wasn't a viable option for us. But the presence of so many schools is Columbia means there aren't many schools hosting (or even racing) meets elsewhere.

The Ed White Festival of Races was one of the few alternatives. It had some promising aspects but came with some questions marks. Fox High School has hosted it in Arnold City Park for nearly 30 years, but last year they didn't have the meet. It had seen some impressive competition in previous years and was only an hour away, and so we went for it. But coming out of the layoff, there were questions as to which schools would return. That became even more concerning when a schedule conflict forced the meet to move from its usual Saturday date to Thursday.

This started a pattern of things not being what we originally expected with the meet. Our school had raced in the park once before for districts back in 2020. However, some landscaping at the park forced the course to be radically redesigned. The park sits near the banks of the Meramec River, and so water drainage is a typically concern. Given the weather forecast, we entered the week expecting to run through a swamp in a steady rain. But the rain cleared out a bit earlier this week, and the bone-dry ground soaked up most of the rain that came earlier in the week, leaving the course soft but not squishy underneath fairly bright sunshine.

And in the end teams did show up. All told 24 high schools entered runners in the meet, with 96 girls and 93 boys completing the varsity races respectively. As for us, this meet was the first of 3 in 10 days. To avoid over-racing athletes, we built a plan for most athletes to race 2 out of 3 where we would still have enough athletes to score as a team in each race. Unfortunately some illness and a few minor injuries took some runners out of this race, and so we only sent 4 boys and 4 girls to the starting line. Unable to score as a team, we put the focus on individual improvement and growth. And in the end we saw a lot of that.

Girls Race

The best team definitively in the girls races was Cor Jesu. This is a team that's been on the podium at state three times in the last five years, enough to move them up from Class 4 into Class 5, where they once again made the podium in 2022. Their best girl didn't run at Arnold, but their #2 athlete stepped right into the void, running away with the victory by almost a minute.

In the chase pack were 4 or 5 girls. Reagan was one of them. She ran a smart race, and in the last half mile was right in the thick of the battle for second. The end of the race is a series of switchbacks through a grove of trees before a final turn into a clearing and the finish stretch. In the final turn of the switchback, Reagan got a little too far to the inside and ended up colliding with a tree. The contact sent her to the ground. She was able to get back up and finish the race, but the incident definitely zapped her a bit physically and mentally and unfortunately forced her to the back of the chase pack where she finished sixth. Thankfully she only came away with a few minor scratches, and as we look toward the postseason where there will be far fewer trees, this race showed a lot of encouraging things.

Before the race, it became clear that Anna's goal was to finish in the top 20 and earn a medal. She went out fast enough to make that happen, and with 1 kilometer to go, she was in 22nd place, 5 seconds back from medal position. She fought incredibly hard through the closing switchbacks, as she and a Bayless athlete and overtook the girl in 20th place. Going into the final stretch, that created a head-to-head battle between the two for the final medal. In what was a photo finish, Anna came up 0.1 seconds short.

That being said, the entire race was a gutsy move on Anna's part, and she fought hard to try to do something very challenging. Even though she came up short on her goal, she blew her PR out of the water in the process, lowering it by more than a minute from our home meet and more than three minutes faster than the times she was running last year. Her finish time of 21:34 moved her all the up to the 2nd fastest time in program history for a sophomore girl and the 5th fastest overall.

A race with the level of competition we saw benefited runners like Audrey, as there were tons of girls in her time range to race with. Back to strength after some illness at Willow Springs, she made the most of the opportunity. She ran a pretty toasty first kilometer, but it didn't cause her to fade. Audrey held her position, and in the fourth kilometer alone she moved past five girls. Like Anna, she came up a bit short in a footrace to the finish. But also like Anna, she smashed her PR, running 27 seconds faster than she did at our home meet. It also marked more than 5 minutes!!! of improvement over what she was running this time two years ago.

Jocelyn was our final girl in the race. The last week has been tough for her as she's been fighting both an achy back and some sickness. It would have been understandable if she opted not to race, but she decided to go for it. She ran a conservative first kilometer, which was a smart decision given the circumstances. At that point she was 25 seconds behind the next closest runner, and by the second kilometer that gap had expanded to more than 50 seconds.

But over the course of the race she stuck to her tempo, even with no competition to motivate her. Each of her last three kilometers was faster than the one before it, and her final kilometer was the fastest of all. This is textbook for how we teach racing and made Jocelyn an easy case for our Pace Award for the race. And in her case it worked. At the 3rd kilometer the gap had shortened to 40 seconds, and at the 4th kilometer she made up more than 35 seconds!!! to pull within 4 seconds of the next runners. By the end of the race she not only caught the next runner but finished just seconds behind the next group of runners who had a 20 second lead going into the final kilometer. She also managed to squeak out a new PR by 5 seconds. Given how the week had gone, these were huge wins!

Boys Race

In the boys race, it was Clayton that ran away with the victory on the team side. However, it was Elijah Case from St. Charles who ran away with the 40-second margin of victory.

Carter started the race in a pack battling for 3rd place. Even as some of that pack faded, he held his own. A few runners did ultimately slip ahead in the last 2 kilometers, but he was able to create space from the rest and finish with a time of 16:55, the third fastest of his career. To get back under the 17-minute mark is a great indicator of the progress to come in the second half of the season.

With Luke battling some illnesses and injuries, we have a group of 4-5 boys who have had to step up to round out our team score. Every race they push each other, and it's always a bit of a mystery which one will cross the finish line first. But during this stretch of meets, we split the group up to see how they could run facing a bit more independence. At Fox the stage belonged to Caden and Bo.

Caden went right to work. During our hard workout last week, he looked really strong. That's usually a sign of good things to come. And boy did they come! Caden went out fast but backed off before things became unmanageable. That allowed him to slowly ramp things up in the second half of the race, passing 6 runners over the next three kilometers. One of those snuck past him at the finish line, but that's still someone he closed an 8-second gap on from the 1st kilometer. With some really solid pacing, it's no surprise that he came away with a new PR. What was surprising was that it was 84 seconds faster than the one he'd set back at our home meet! Caden put in a ton of consistent work this summer. We believed that would pay some serious dividends, and so it's awesome to see him start to cash some of those checks. He made a perfect choice for our team's Spirit Stick this meet.

Bo started out the race fast. It might have been a touch too spicy, as he gave up some ground in the second kilometer. However, he proceeded to make that ground back up. At the 4K mark he was sort of stuck in no man's land, 7 seconds back from a pair of runners. One of those runners was fading, and Bo caught him fairly easily. The other one continued to maintain a decent lead and was still several seconds out front going into the final turn. However, Bo found a powerful final gear, flew past the other athlete during the home stretch, and finished 2 seconds ahead.

Tristin was our final runner. Much like Jocelyn, he spent the majority of the race competing with himself and the clock. At the 1K he was already 45 second behind the nearest runner. But he stayed true to his pacing, and after a slight slowdown in the 3rd kilometer, Tristin really started to find his form. By the final kilometer, he was cooking. In fact, his 5th kilometer was 8 seconds faster than his first, and his finish was one of the strongest he's ever had. Running a 5K is a mental grind, but running essentially alone shows a real degree of dedication and grit that we're proud of.

All told we had 4 of our 8 runners set new PRs, with one more running a season best. We would have liked to see some team scores, but we are incredibly excited by the individual accomplishments that we were still able to attain.

The Big Digital Downlow