First Week of Racing

First week of racing.

It’s always great to get the cobwebs off and get back to racing. The Wildcats had a chance to get two races in this week.  Thursday we hosted Oswego East in a dual and Saturday was the annual Plainfield City Championship.

Coming into the week we had a few guys nursing some bumps and bruises, the summer routine has ended and now school has set in and often the results of increased stress and lack of sleep impacts runners physically.

Thursday evening Oswego East came to our place for a nice weekday dual. Its great that we have such a strong area for distance running, and OE brings some serious runners this year. The meet included many great highlights. Here are just a few:

Fr/So race was 2 miles and our crew battled tough with OE. The guys were led by The Fab Four Freshman: Cam Mulyk (3^rd 11:43, Mike Forbear 4^th 11:54, Aaron Wyckoff 5^th 11:54, and Paul De Avila 8^th 12:08). All of those time compared very well with what our top Fr/So guys ran at our opener last year, except most of those guys were sophomores and are now leading our team at the varsity level. A few other highlights from the Fr/So crew, Alex Rojo ran exactly even splits (7:04, 7:04) and passed 5 guys the second half the race. Nathan Weyer and Luke Edmondson both improved their opening season marks by over 90 seconds from last year.

The varsity crew featured some strong highlights. Ryan Robinson ran a very well executed race in his first XC race. He hung tough with the top group and came away with a high improvement. Ryan ran 12:28 for 2 miles at our time trial, at this meet Ryan ran 18:28 for 3 miles. The race resulted in the 1^st Penguin Award for Ryan. Alix Awalt continues his proof that hard work works, he improved his all-time PR from 24:03 to 21:50 in his season opener. Alix’s hard work also resulted in a well deserved honor of Runner of the Week, as voted by his teammates.  

The City Championships is a great meet. Coach Prieboy and Coach Crowe have done a great job of building a great meet to kick off the season for the Plainfield running community. The guys had two athletes who were All-City (top 10 in their race). Cam Mulyk led the way in the Fr/So race, finishing 9^th place in 18:04. A very strong first 3 mile XC race. Javy Garcia led the way in the varsity race, running an inspired race, moving from 10^th at the mile to 9^th at halfway and then finishing 6^th overall for All-City.

The Fab Four (Cam, Mike, Paul, Aaron) led the way for the fr/so crew. Luke Edmondson and new comer Gabe Feehan rounded out the top 7 for the team. Looking at the results, Cam and Mike ended up being the top two freshman in the race. If you scored the freshman separate from the sophomores the Wildcats would have been the top team scoring 30 points to North’s 40. Alex Rojo ran as very strong race as our 5^th freshman. Freshman Jayson Matula ran a tough race, putting himself out there with an aggressive start (coming through two miles in 14:10, which was 12 seconds faster than he finished a two mile race just two days before on a much faster course. Jayson hung tough the final mile to run a great race and earn the 1^st Penguin Award for the City Championship.

Besides Javy’s inspired race to finish All-City, Dean Eubanks and Austin Emrath both finished near the front of the pack to lead the team.

After one week of racing the guys have shown some competitiveness. The goal we talked about at the City Championship was to compete, not to worry about time, but just put yourself in a place to compete, and I think we made some great strides towards that goal. I can’t wait to see what this season has in store for the Wildcats.