2 October 2010
The NYA boys cross-country team had a banner day on Saturday at the Festival of Champions in Belfast. Under perfectly blue skies, more than 700 boys toed the line over the course of three separate heats to race the flat, grassy 3.1 mile course. About 65 schools entered runners in the race, including some from Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Nova Scotia (not all schools had complete teams). Belfast has a very spectator-friendly course, so those who wanted to hustle a little bit could see the runners at nearly every stage of the race.
Every NYA boy who ran on Saturday set a personal record for the 5K distance. Most of those PRs beat the old times by at least 40 seconds – and some dropped well over 2 minutes. These great performances vaulted the team into rarified territory – 12th overall in a huge meet like this is a very significant accomplishment. NYA was the top Class C school at the meet and we beat very many talented and deep teams from Classes A and B.
Cam Regan and Evan Kendall started the boys seeded (fast) heat at a blazing speed. Although they suffered the consequences later in the race, they both held on to set new PRs in impressive times. Cam finished 31st overall in 17:17. Evan finished 39th in 17:31. Rudy Guliani was once again the third runner for the boys, dropping about 45 seconds off of his PR to finish in 18:20 (94th). Elliot Daniels continues to show dramatic improvement from race to race (18:34 / 113th). Brian Trelegan had a breakthrough race (18:39 / 122nd) as he led the team’s pack of 4,5, and 6 runners over most of the course. Grant McPherson (18:53 / 144th) also set a significant PR, going below 19 minutes for the first time. Coming out of the freshman heat, Ian Moore sliced about a minute and a half off his previous best time to serve as NYA’s 7th man. Ian was 22nd in the freshman race (19:22). Another impressive freshman performance came from Jonas Damion (20:11 / 49th).
Other PR-setting NYA runners included: Jake Susla (20:18 / 336th overall), Robert Field (20:25 / 339th), Max Maurer (23:55 /125th in freshman race), Alex Paige (24:11 / 130th in freshman race), Ethan Liu (26:29 / 318th in the unseeded race), Phong Ho, who cut nearly 3 full minutes off his old PR, (27:14, 322nd unseeded), Edward Elliot (28:20, 324th unseeded), and Nate Ward-Chene (33:23 / 333rd unseeded).
Congratulations to all the boys on a fine day! Full combined results and team scores can be viewed here.
The team races next on Thursday 10/7 at Falmouth Community Park for the WMC Championship.