The dual meet season wraps up today with a meet against Brookline at Cold Springs Park. After this, it's on to the league meet, the State Coaches meet, and the EMass championships.
The Brookline boys expect to wrap up their second straight undefeated season with a win over the Tigers today. On paper, it's no contest, with Brookline having four runners well under 17:00 minutes (no one on North has ever run that fast). On the other hand, Newton has a lot of motivation to run well. For one thing, it is only their second home meet of the year. For another, they have been working really hard and have skipped invitational meets to focus on the dual meet season. Win or lose, I expect the Newton boys to set a host of PR's and make the meet respectable.
The Cold Springs Park course is in excellent shape and should be fast. Yesterday the girls team went over the course with rakes to remove dead leaves, branches, and loose rocks. The result is a safer and faster course for the final meet.
Like the Brookline boys, the Newton North girls are expected to win their meet easily. Although the Brookline girls have had an excellent season, and will finish with a winning record, the word on the street is that Brookline's top two runners -- Sabrina Parise and Emily Groopman -- are training through this meet to save themselves for the league meet on Saturday. On the Newton side, Jess Barton is expected to either skip the meet entirely (she is nursing a slight cold) or work with other runners on the team to help them to better times.
While the outcome of the team races might seem to be a forgone conclusion, the meet is important and significant to the dozens of runners who have their one chance to see how much they have improved in the last six weeks. It is very powerful to see times drop by 1-2 minutes or even more in that time, as the kids gain confidence and fitness and find themselves able to push themselves to new levels of accomplishment. Good luck to all, and may everyone set a personal best!
Cold Spring Park Best Times
On the Newton North web site is a list of all the sub-18:00 times recorded at the Cold Springs course since 2001. (I apologize for not having a similar list for girls -- that will have to be a project for off-season).
How many boys will go sub 18:00 today? Will anyone challenge the course record of 15:34, or the fastest non-NNHS time of 16:15? Surprisingly, only five runners from other schools have gone under 17:00 in the last five+ years. It seems that this year's Brookline team has a chance to add several names to that list.
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2 comments:
feels good to be sitting pretty in 4th behind some pretty fast runners
When I was a soph on HS I had a similar experience in a race, where I was in the lead pack with 3 or 4 other guys. I still remember how cool it was to look around and think... "this is great, I'm running with these really fast guys.. AND I BELONG HERE!"
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