Solid 6th at Locktoberfest

Today was a meet that we've been looking forward to for a while. For whatever reason (likely how it falls in relation to our training), we generally run poorly the weekend of Culver but then usually run well at Lockport. On top of that expectation of a strong showing, we knew today was an opportunity to see where we stacked up against some of the teams in our sectional that we'll be battling with for a state finals birth.

While we ran pretty well today, we recognized immediately that we have a lot of room to improve and although we, overall, had a very good day, we are lucky that Sectionals is 4 weeks away!

We started things off with the Frosh/Soph race where the underclassmen got us rolling with a very solid race. The boys managed a 7th place finish in the 22 team field. Freshman Eddie Siuda continued his great freshman season by placing 7th out of 194 runners, covering the incredibly hilly and tough Dellwood Park 5k course in 17:17. To place that into some context, Stephen Pipilas (who re-wrote our record books for Freshmen last year in CC & Track) ran 17:38 a year ago. The next finisher was Marc Alvarez who has been on a tear lately seemingly finding a groove in races and continually getting better. Marc was 37th and just under 18 minutes. Having been to Lockport many times over the years, I generally believe that you can subtract a whole minute to predict what that effort would equate to on a typical (not mountainous) 3 mile course. That would hypothetically have put Marc under 17 minutes for the first time in his career. Marc dropped 1:57 off his time at Lockport a year ago! Our 3rd finisher was Akhil Ghosh who has been a very welcome addition to the team after not running his freshman year. He was just over 18 minutes for the run. Not far back was freshman James Weigel who placed 56th in 18:17. Our 5th runner was Rylan Dreyer who ran 3:25 faster than last year for an 18:45 finishing time. Another impressive performance was Ryan Gage who was 1:59 faster than a year ago.

Next up was the varsity race. As a team, we placed a very strong 6th out of 25 teams. As mentioned above, we were lucky this wasn't sectionals as we'd likely have missed qualifying for state by 5 points. We finished only 8 points behind DGN who was 4th and 5 back from Plainfield South who was 6th. We did manage to beat state-ranked Oswego with our strong race today. Knowing that we'll most likely need to find a way to beat either North or South to qualify (and make sure we don't slip up against other strong teams that were behind us today like Plainfield North and Shepard), we have to be encouraged that through 4 runners we had them both beat. Unfortunately, our 5-7 guys were a bit too far back of our top 4, leading to us narrowly getting beaten. The fact that our overall team time was actually 14 seconds faster than Plainfield South illustrates exactly how close this race was today. Our number 1 beat their number 1 by 32 seconds, a sizeable margin, but it was only worth 12 points today. Their number 5 beat our number 5 by 17 seconds but the race is much more densely packed there which amounted to 16 points. On runners 2-4, they beat us by 1 point.

While today we fell just shy of those teams, we have to be encouraged by a number of things. For just the second time this season, we were healthy enough to race our top 7 together. We are hitting our stride at the right time of year as evidenced by the fact that the last time we raced DGN, they beat us by 242 points (should be noted that we were shorthanded at that point and a bigger meet will lead to bigger point discrepancies) and today 8. Also, two of our top 4 are only 3 races in and just this race things looked like they were clicking for Jack and Joey. Our 3rd runner Max O'Meara literally missed two straight weeks of training due to illness, which he is just now getting close to 100% from and our #2 runner was running on relatively tired legs from winning the Sophomore race at the Joe Mortimer Invite only about 40 hours before. As strange as it may sound, even though it's October and many guys on the team are nearing the end of their respective season, our varsity group really is just now getting going and coming together. It certainly looks to be an exciting October of racing!

The highlight of the day for DGS, no doubt was the reemergence of Jack LaLonde as one of the finest runners in the state. Jack had some setbacks early in the season and was forced to cross train (along with Joey and Bulldog... all of whom have gained my utmost respect for the diligence and ferocity they attacked the elliptical training and pool running). Today was his first good race back and a great sign of things to come. He placed 4th overall today and ran the fastest any Mustang ever had at Lockport, 15:57. Stephen Pipilas was our second finisher placing 23rd overall, followed closely by Max O'Meara and Joey Eterno (27th and 32nd). Alan Zhou, Zach Scheffel, and Austin Rutkowski all finished close together placing 62nd, 76th, and 79th.

In the open race, first year junior Zack Wascher led the way with his 8th place finish. He ran a (equivalent) lifetime best of 17:40. Some other notable performances were turned in by Sayuj Shah, Will Beine, and Jack Hudec, all of whom dropped over a minute from a year ago. Jimmy Slowik and Kyle Hall also ran well dropping 50+ seconds off last years time.

Obviously, we are pleased with our progress that was illustrated in today's meet but certainly not satisfied. For the varsity guys, the season really gets started in October and we're off to a fine start. For everyone else, the focus really shifts to October 17th and the WSC Gold Championship that we'll be hosting. Monday will be our last contest prior to the championship meet. We'll be at home against conference rivals Hinsdale South and Willowbrook.