St. Olaf - the Pre Nationals Meet

This past weekend the St. Scholastica cross country team traveled to the St. Olaf invitational in Northfield Minnesota. This meet is a highly competitive meet with about 35 teams and 300 to 400 runners. The course is relatively flat, but has a few challenging hills. It is very wide and is only one loop. This year the course is also the host of the NCAA regional race, and the NCAA national championships – so lots of good teams were present to get course experience.

I started out the race at a 5:18 pace. I was about 8 seconds slower that I would have liked, but with the number of runners on the course it was hard for me to get around the pack. This was a good wake up call for the Griak in two weeks though, at big races I need to go out fast! At the 5K mark I came by in 16:28. Still a little slow, but not bad. Just past the 6K mark I made a strong move up a 200 meter long shallow hill. I moved ahead of a group of about 6 runners and was able to sustain the surge most of the rest of the race.

In the end I race a 27:40, which moved me up to 7^th on the St. Scholastica all time XC performance list. I was also first on our team, which placed 20^th overall. We took down some large schools outside of our conference, and beat all of the schools from our conference as well. I think it was a good individual race performance, though I still have more left in me.

This coming week is a high intensity training week, and then I have a medium volume week going into Griak which should leave me in good shape of the second half of the season. But i’m especially looking forward to Pine Hill and Oshkosh because they are first-class courses – and at these races moving up to the top 5 or even 3 on the CSS all time XC performance list is a distinct possibility.

Images from the race: