Ready to rumble at the Nalley Invite

Junior Conor Dunham prepares to lead off the Wolfpack 4×400 with the score tied 77-77 at the end of the Nalley Invite.  Photo by Steven Bugarin.

At the Carlin Nalley Invitational on Saturday, after the first week of real spring weather, there were two occasions which reminded and admonished me about my delinquency as a blogger.

The first occasion came in conversation with Chris Quick, the Palatine High School boys cross country and distance coach.  Last year Quick published his book, One Way, Uphill Only, which told the year-long story of how the 2011 Palatine cross country team won the IHSA 3A state cross country championship.  Quick and I had begun an ongoing sporadic conversation on a number of topics involving coaching and our boys at the Palatine Relays the Saturday before, and we picked up the conversation several times as we hung around the 200 meter mark at the Nalley Invite for various events.   That included watching Quick’s boys win the 4×800 in a Palatine High School record time of 7:50.0—also the fastest time in the state this year.

At some point I asked him about his book—and what was the process for writing and publishing it.  He had a bit of news, in fact.  Originally self-published, the book will soon be released again in a new edition by Breakaway Books, which prints literary and thoughtful writing on sports.   Most of the material from the book, he told me, came from hundreds of pages of journal writing.  Quick, who teaches high school English, coaches two long seasons, and has a young family, disciplined himself to write for an hour each day over the year-long period covered by the book.  “The journal entries weren’t only about coaching,” he explained, “some of them were more philosophical.”

So Quick wrote a book—and for two months I can’t even write a blog post.

The second was an outright notice about my failure to post.  “Coach Ernst,” said junior Chris Korabik, after he had won the 1600-meter run in a personal best time of 4 minutes 23.75 seconds, “when are you going to update your blog.  I visit it every few days and every time it says, ‘Snow Day.’”

It has been that long.  Korabik and I agreed that our team’s performance at the Nalley Invite certainly merited a blog post.

We’ve been going to the Nalley Invite for ten years.  It follows on Saturday early in May each year after the Friday night Chicago Catholic League Frosh Soph championship meet—a big meet on our calendar.  For most years we have used the meet to give our varsity guys a sharpening race before the varsity Chicago Catholic League meet next Saturday.  Our team often depends pretty heavily on the freshman and sophomore runners who fill spots on our best relays—if not in individual events.  Those younger team members aren’t available to us at Nalley since they run the night before.  We’ve never been able to muster a competitive team effort at Nalley.

The meet is a special treat for the upperclassmen.  Most years it takes place at the Illinois Benedictine University facility in Lisle, with a nine-lane, national-class track, a large grandstand, and generally wonderful amenities.  The facility itself lifts performances.  The meet used FAT long before it became normal for meets to do so.  Ken Jakalski, a coach at Lisle High School and the long-time meet director, is also a Saint Ignatius graduate, as we discovered many years ago.  He runs the meet as much like a state and sectional meet as he can—good practice for the teams.  Jakalski himself mans the microphone for the PA system which introduces most of the athletes as they run, jump, throw, and race.  Many, many boys get a mention and a few moments of glory, often just for competing.

This year we brought a competitive team to Nalley, mainly because we finally have a team that depends mostly on our juniors and seniors.  We didn’t program the event to win.  We entered our top distance runners in just one event, not multiple events like we will likely do at the CCL championship meet next week.  We used most of the relays to get as many of our runners as possible into the meet., rather than program the relays to win by using our top runners in all the events.

But our team, as we discovered Saturday, is indeed a strong one.  As we have done in some other meets this year, we started slowly.  In the first four events, we scored only in the 110-meter high hurdles.  But we scored big, as juniors Conor Dunham (15.10 prelims, 15.17 finals) and Chris Hawkins (15.24, 15,23) finished second and third.

Then in the 3200 senior co-capatin Jack Keelan took the lead at the start and never looked back.  The plan was to make a good effort, but not to run too fast with big meets ahead at the conference, sectional, and state level in the next three weeks.  Keelan was the IHSA 3A cross country champion in the fall, and he set our school record for 3200-meters, 8:50.74, at the Arcadia Invitational in California back in early April.  Obviously, that was just one event of several that I failed to blog about this spring.

At Nalley Keelan  settled into a steady pace of 71- and 72-second laps for six laps, running easily.  Then in lap seven he accelerated to run 65 seconds—and in the final lap, a 64.  His final time of 9:19.55 was still among the top five times run this year in Illinois.

Junior Chris Hawkins jumps personal bests of 43-7 and 21-5 to win the triple jump and the long jump. Photo by Steven Bugarin.

Hawkins, between his hurdling efforts, was also doing big things in the triple jump.  The night before a text message from Hawkins complained about a sore hip.  He is regularly our top points scorer as a hurdler and our number one jumper—and the injury was a concern.  When he climbed into the minibus in the morning in uniform, it was almost a surprise.  The assessment of our assistant coach and physical therapy student Ike Ofor was that Hawkins had an illiotibial band problem—manageable, if somewhat painful.

Hawkins had performed well in the hurdles.  In the triple jump, his first three jumps were the three best jumps of his life, with his best jump of 43 feet and 7 inches almost a foot better than his previous best.  That jump stood up as the best of the day, with Hawkins passing in each rotation of the final as the last jumper–and saving his energy and tolerance for a sore hip for the long jump.

A check of the scoring early in the meet put Ignatius in second place with 34 points, behind Lincoln-Way East, who had quickly totaled 54.

In the 800-meter run, announcer Jakalski’s attention and the attention of the crowd was focused on Marist’s Kyle Hauser, as he ran the state’s fastest time of the year, 1:53.8.  But the Ignatius attention was on senior Sean Kampe, who started back in the pack.  Near the 400 mark he accelerated toward the front of the race, passing the first lap in 56.6 seconds—very fast.  Then coming off the third turn he moved again into second place behind Hauser, putting a big gap between the third place place runner.  He was 1:26.5 at 600 meters.  Kampe slowed slightly on the final straightaway, but finished in 1:57.25, a personal best by over two seconds.

That personal best had, in fact, been a relay leg at the state track meet in May of 2011.  Kampe, a soccer player, took last year off to play on a demanding club team which wouldn’t allow him to accommodate both sports.  But even as he had taken leave last spring, he told us he would be back to run as a senior.  Kampe now has the number one time in the Chicago Catholic League for 800 meters, and he will be the favorite to win next week.

What’s more, he had scored important points for the team.

In the 400-meter dash senior Elliot Gibson ran a personal best of 51.17 seconds for fourth place.  Gibson had finished pole vaulting about an hour before.  At Nalley, the best pole vaulters go first on the pit in the morning, and then a second group of novice vaulters follow in the afternoon.  Gibson had bested the accomplished group, clearing 13 feet and 3 inches, a personal best, and taking the event lead on first clears and misses.  But the event would not be final until the novice vaulters finished.

In the 300-meter intermediate hurdles, junior Conor Dunham squared off against Austin Corydon of Lincoln-Way East, winner of the 110 hurdles.  Dunham looked to be in the lead over the first hurdles, then fell behind on the big sweeping curve of the Illinois Benedictine track.  With three hurdles to go, Dunham seemingly lowered his head into a headwind and accelerated ahead of the others, winning in 39.30 seconds.

Results of the long jump were announced, which we already knew.  Hawkins had taken the lead in the preliminaries with a jump of 21 feet and 5 inches.  He had again passed in each of the final rounds as the other jumpers failed to match him—although there was a challenge from Parker Westphal of Bolingbrook.  Hawkins beat him by an inch and a half in the triple jump—and by an inch in the long jump.

The 1600-meter run turned out to be a little bit of a surprise.  We expected junior Chris Korabik to run well and compete for the win.  He settled into third for the first couple laps, coming through the 400 in 65 seconds and the 800 in about 2:12.  Then he took the lead, with two runners holding on behind him as he ran a 68 second third 400.  A challenger closed on him with about 250 meters left, and Korabik accelerated.  With 100 meters to go, there was another challenge—and then Korabik hit a finishing gear, kicking strongly to finish in 4:23.75, a personal best by two seconds.

Junior Chris Korabik wins the 1600 in a personal best time of 4:23.75. Photo by Steven Bugarin.

Meanwhile behind Korabik, the real surprise was junior Taylor Dugas.  After missing almost a month of running at the end of March and in early April with a sore foot that was finally diagnosed as a nerve problem, Dugas returned to sporadic running three weeks ago.  He’s doing his aerobic work on the bicycle and in the pool, and he is running only in our interval workouts on the track.  At Nalley the plan was for Dugas to run 70-second laps.  The real goal was for him to get in shape to help us with depth for our 4×800 relay in the season’s final weeks.  He came through the first 400 in about 68, running in 12^th place.  He was 2:17 at the 800—but he looked relaxed and strong.  He had wanted time splits during the race, hoping he could keep on pace and on plan.  Instead I yelled to him, “There are six medals, and six places score.  You are in tenth.”

Dugas proceeded over the next two laps to move past four runners to finish sixth, running a personal best of 4:35.69.

Jakalski made an announcement after the 1600 that Saint Ignatius was now winning the meet with 77 points.  I pulled out my new Iphone—and tweeted that news.  I haven’t been blogging, but in the months since my last blog post we bought an Iphone plan and started a team twitter account:  @ernsttracksicp.  I have been tweeting from our meets for about a month, including updates all day at Nalley.  I typed in the news:  “At Nalley Invite Wolfpack in first with 77 points before 4×4.”

But in my excitement after the 1600 success, I had forgotten about the 200-meter final.  We had a runner in that final heat, junior Francisco Meraz, but he didn’t score.  Lincoln-Way East, however, had two finalists—and they finished first and fourth.  My next tweet:  “But tied with Lincoln Way East.”

At the start of the 4×400, Elliot Gibson gathered on the line with our strong 4×400 team of senior Andrew Reardon, Dunham, and Kampe—and with the Lincoln-Way East team lining up beside him.  We had the top seed in the race after our good effort at the Palatine Relays last week where the same team ran 3:28.30.  The team was confident—but the pressure would seemingly be on them to win the meet for us.

Jakalski announced on the PA that the meet was tied, 77 points for Ignatius, 77 points for Lincoln-Way East.  The 4×400 would decide the meet, he said, adding, apparently as an aside, that the novice pole vaulters had just finished vaulting and the final pole vault results weren’t included yet in the total.

“How did your team do in the pole vault?” a Lincoln-Way East runner asked Gibson.

Gibson couldn’t help but smile when he told him, “Well, I won the pole vault.”

“That means we lost,” said the disappointed opponent.

Senior Elliot Gibson takes baton from senior Andrew Reardon for the anchor leg of the 4×400 relay at the Nalley Invite. Photo by Steven Bugarin.

The Wolfpack runners ran as if it did still matter.  Dunham lead off the 4×400 with a leg of 52.7, about a second faster than he had run the previous week at Palatine, and off the break Kampe stormed down the back straightaway into the lead.  His relay split was a personal best of 50.5.  Reardon held the lead with a 51.5 leg, and Gibson took the baton with Oswego East chasing him just a step behind—but with a big lead on the rest of the teams, including Lincoln-Way East.  Gibson was never really challenged as he ran 50.1 seconds to win.

We had won the meet running away, as well, scoring 97 points total, ahead of Lincoln-Way East’s 79.

My tweet:  “At Nalley Invite Wolfpack wins 4×4 3:24.88 and meet. “That’s a dirty time,” says Taylor Dugas. #clutch.”  Coach Ofor supplied the hashtag.

We have had great success as a team this year, and the boys knew the drill.  We took some team photos.  The Nalley meet is the only one all year that we designate as a “run and go” meet.  It comes as many of our upperclass boys are preparing for the start of AP exams next week, and the demands of other schoolwork are pressing as the year draws to a close.  It is also just a long day in the sun, with the first events starting at 9:15 and the 4×400 finishing at around 4:15.  We sent many of our boys home early, and we had only a crew of 11 boys for the team photo.

Jakalski then descended from the press box with his camera, after announcing that he needed photos of the winning teams from the meet’s 1A and 2A/3A divisions for the cover of next year’s program.  We took a photo with the winning team’s plaque.  Jakalski insisted we take it out of the box and plastic wrap for the photo.

I tweeted a team photo—and then a photo of the plaque—and then we packed up our tent and headed back to Chicago in our mini-bus.

We have high hopes for the Chicago Catholic League Championship meet next week.  At Nalley we posted our best times of the year in virtually every event that we targeted to do so.  We have three weeks left in a season of more than 20 weeks—and our team seems ready to run its best when it counts the most.

The caption on Twitter @ernsttracksicp: “At Nalley Invite Wolfpack win. pic.twitter.com/g39pK7qj7o”

Too much to think about on this snow day

No school today means no practice. Should a coach be worried?

Virtually every other year that I can remember in my ten years as a coach at Saint Ignatius College Prep, the news of a snow day at this time of year—while attractive as a day off from school—would pose problems for us.

We are in the closing weeks of our indoor season, preparing for the Chicago Catholic League Indoor Track Championships that are less than two weeks away.

Snow means our outdoor track is covered and unusable at a time of year when we have hopes that it could be available for practicing hurdles, baton passing, and jumps.  Snow means neither our sprinters nor our distance runners can do track workouts on the snowy track, something we like to do in preparation for our most important indoor meet.

Snow means we miss a day of school and therefore a day of practice when we need to practice.

But this year, when our principal announced over the PA system at the close of school yesterday that an approaching March snow storm would mean no school today, I just smiled and cheered with the students.

Our team is really running and competing right now as well as we could ever hope.  Snow on our track and a missed day of practice for us probably means similar problems for our competitors.  They are trying to catch us right now; they probably need the practice more than we do in order to do so.  I also know that most of our boys will be out running in the snow on their own today; I suspect that not all coaches have that confidence.

Senior co-captain Jack Keelan ran 4:16.29, a new meet record and the top time in Illinois this year, to win the 1600 at St. Patrick High School’s ICOPS Invitational on Sunday, March 3 on a new surface at Lewis University. Behind him, freshman Dan Santino ran 4:29.61 for third place–and the fastest time for a freshman in Illinois so far this year. Is this too much too soon for our team?  Photo by Steven Bugarin.

What our boys have accomplished so far this season is unprecedented for us.  On Sunday our team produced a surprisingly dominating performance at the ICOPS Invitational.  It is probably true that it was a slightly weaker meet in terms of overall depth than it has been in some years—especially in the distance events.  The relay events were a little bit weaker, too, perhaps.  There were some quirks and luck involved in a few events for us.

But our Saint Ignatius boys scored 120 points, the highest point total that I can find for this meet, which I have attended for ten years as a coach.  The second place team, our CCL rival Providence Catholic, scored 61 points, with other CCL teams trailing them:  De La Salle, 57.5, Brother Rice 43, Mt. Carmel 31, Loyola 29.

Overconfidence is not a problem that our Ignatius boys know at all well; we are used to being the chasers, not the front runners.  Last year we were second in this same meet to Providence, but that strong performance gave us some clues that we had a chance against Providence in the CCL meet.  In a surprise come from behind performance, we won the CCL indoor meet as an underdog.

This year we are now the overdog.  And we could shoot ourselves in the foot with some overconfidence, perhaps.  Managing success is a new skill for me to learn as a coach.

The margin of our ICOPS victory, in a meet when we ran some of our best runners in only one event, suggests we have some options that we usually would not have.  In the outdoor season, our conference holds its frosh soph championships and its varsity championships on different days—so the younger boys get to compete in both meets if they are varsity-caliber.  But in the winter indoor meet, both the frosh soph and the varsity championship meets will take place on Sunday, March 17, with events alternating between varsity and frosh-soph races.  Boys can only run in one meet or the other.

We keep separate records for the frosh soph and varsity meets, as well.  So even if you are a sophomore, you can’t set a frosh-soph record running in the varsity meet.

Junior Chris Korabik runs a personal best 9:53.78 to win the 3200 at ICOPS, with sophomore Andy Weber second in 9:58.86–just off the PR he set last week.  Photo by Steven Bugarin.

We have two young runners who have a chance to set indoor frosh soph conference records—if they run the frosh soph meet.  At ICOPS, they were big point scorers for our varsity team.  Sophomore Andrew Weber ran 9:58.86 for 3200 meters to finish second; freshman Dan Santino ran 4:29.61 for third in the 1600.  The Frosh Soph conference mark for 3200 is 9:56.97, set by William Hague of Loyola in 2010; the 1600 mark is 4:39.90 by Rob Glavas of Brother Rice in 2006.

Are we confident enough to weaken our varsity team and enter our two strong younger runners in the frosh soph meet to give them a shot at those records?  This was not a problem that we expected to have to consider before last Sunday.

Our early success, especially the great performances of our distance runners, raises another issue.  Are we running too fast too soon?

We have a long track season that stretches from January to May, when the really important meets loom—our outdoor CCL championships on Saturday, May 11, and then two state series meets: a sectional qualifying meet on Thursday, May 16, and the state meet in Charleston on Friday and Saturday, May 24-25.  We want to be at our best in May, not in March.

We have a pretty standard plan that we follow year after year in our training for the long season.   We are following our normal plan; our boys have not been doing anything differently this season.  But our results have been better than other years by a large margin.

As a bench mark, we expect boys to begin our indoor season running better than they ran during the previous indoor season—but still well behind what they had run at the end of the previous outdoor season.  We don’t expect new PRs during the indoor season, and we don’t train to accomplish that.

This year, our boys are basically beginning in the indoor season right where they left off last year at the end of the outdoor season.  When Dyestat.com went live this week, we discovered many of our early season efforts put us at or near the top of the Illinois leader boards.  The Illinois Prep Top Times site has another set of leaderboards populated with a large number of meets; we sit near the top of many events on those boards, as well.

We are hoping, of course, that this just means they are way better than they were last year.  We have reason to think this is true.  We know we should have finished our cross country season a little bit better than we did as a team.  Our current results are in line with what we thought we should have accomplished in the fall.  Our boys also, apparently, did a great job of preparation for the current track season in the months of November, December, and January between cross country and track.  They did this work, incidentally, on their own; I had barely a word with them during these months.

Our trip to the Jesuit Invite in Washington, DC, perhaps, injected a new level of incentive at an earlier point in the season—the end of February—than in past years.  The ICOPS meet in March, in past years, has been the first meet in which we tested ourselves.  We were obviously ready for that test this year.

Like many other coaches, I can insist that we really haven’t begun our hard training yet—the training that is supposed to produce fast times at the end of the year.  We did some tempo running once a week in the first month of practice, along with our long runs; our weekly totals hover around 50 miles in the winter for our top boys, sometimes a little bit more for the boys who get a long, long run in on Sundays.  A couple weeks ago we started phase two of the five-phase season plan, adding some faster running once a week—llike 12×400 at about 3200 goal pace, with a pretty long recovery jog, for example.  Our races amount to a second workout on the track at this point of the season.  When we don’t race, we might add a second workout.

But it isn’t just a matter of workouts, perhaps.  There is a mental aspect to “too much too soon.”

Our boys, to be sure, are a little bit giddy with their success this season—no different than their coaches, perhaps.  But senior co-captain Jack Keelan took a moment in a team meeting on Monday to remind everyone of the big goals.  “The real goals are at the end of the season,” he reminded us.  “We have won some meets and that’s great.  But we haven’t really accomplished anything yet this season when we look at the big goals we still have ahead of us.”

Keelan, incidentally, doesn’t even look at the leader boards.  He just shrugs when we report to him about those rankings.  His message to his teammates is clear:  Rankings are fine, but you have to do it on the track.

We have things that we do to protect against too much too soon.  As a pretty hard and fast rule, we do not compete in the Illinois Prep Top Times meet, often recognized as the “unofficial state indoor championship,” at the end of March after our CCL championship meet.  Many of our boys will qualify for this meet—especially this year.  But the CCL meet is about as high as we want our boys to be in March.  We don’t want another big effort that early in the season.

We actually take a three-week break from competition from mid-March to early-April when we begin competing outdoors.  We will, however, train hard during those weeks.  It is our way of taking a step back physically and mentally in order to prepare for a big second push.

We will find out in a few months if we have been running too well too soon.  What we hope lies ahead of us is some new territory.  Our early results suggest that our team should be competing in May for points at the state meet in a number of events.  In my ten years at Ignatius, we have never had more than one athlete score in the state meet in any year.

The snow is getting harder outside.  I should be grading papers on this gift of a snow day that allows me some catch up time.  I have some results work to catch up on, as well, for our track team.

Instead, this snow day gives me too much time to think about problems that, in fact, are the results of another wonderful gift:  our great results so far this season.

Sometimes we get too many gifts.

“Will they let us take the trophy on the plane?”

Junior Chris Korabik holds the first place trophy from the Georgetown Prep Jesuit Invite aboard United flight 557 from DC to Chicago.

It wasn’t long after the announcement that our Saint Ignatius boys track team had won the Georgetown Preparatory School’s Jesuit Invite that someone asked the fun question.

“Will they let us take the trophy on the plane?”

Don’t worry.  The boys carried the trophy onto the plane without difficulty when we traveled home to Chicago on Saturday afternoon.  It passed the TSA inspection.  I didn’t get a story yet from the boy who actually carried the trophy into the TSA security gate.  But I am sure it will be a good one.

It was a surprising win for the team.  On Thursday night as we traveled by bus and plane from school to our hotel in Gaithersburg, MD, and on Friday before the meet as we traveled around the DC area by bus and Metro, I had delivered an honest assessment to the team.  The entries and performance list for the meet listed four 40-plus-foot shot putters for Fordham Prep High School from New York City–along with two 14-foot pole vaulters and two more over 12 feet.  There were no shot putters from any other teams to challenge the Fordham shot putters, and our three pole vaulters–a 13-footer, and two 11-footers–were the only other contestents.  It was quite likely that after just two events, Fordham would hold a lead of about 50 points.

And when the meet actually started, it went a little bit worse for us.  Running different events with a different meet order from what we were used to, we thought we had made an intelligent meet lineup and plan.  But we had made a few mistakes with calculations and strategy, especially concerning the time between events for some of the boys.  The meet moved a lot quicker than we were used to in Illinois.  The first event started at 4:30, and we were eating dinner in a nearby room in Georgetown Prep’s Hanley Center at 7:15.  That’s a fast track meet.

Our pole vaulters had a special challenge.  We had decided to borrow poles in DC, not ship our own.  We had also entered our vaulters in other events, and they were answering calls for those events as they tried to vault.  Whatever the reason, our dependable number one vaulter, Elliot Gibson, no heighted for the first time ever.  He had cleared his first height 11-feet-6 easily twice, only to fail in throwing his pole both times, and the pole knocked down the bar.  Fordham Prep ultimately went 1,2,3, and 4 in both the pole vault and shot put, as our vaulters Emmett Boyle and Mickey Smith split points for fifth and sixth in a tie at 10 feet and 6 inches, with similar misses.  We were down 56 to 3 after two events.

We didn’t make up any ground in the other early field events.  In the long jump, our Chris Hawkins had finished third with a jump of 19 feet and 10.5 inches; Fordham was sixth—a small gain.  In the high jump, Fordham was fourth, and Smith tied for sixth—so we lost a little ground.

Our overall strategy for the meet was to put our strongest runners in the individual events, where they could score maximum points.  We scheduled our second tier of runners—good runners, just not our best, and often our younger boys–in the relays, hoping they could pick up a few points, even if they might not get top points.  In the 4×800 early in the meet, this worked more or less as planned as Kallin Khan, Sean Stevens, Mickey Smith, and Patrick Manglano finished sixth for one point in 9:07; they ran well, with close to personal best efforts for all four.

But combined with the early field event results, the 4×800 results stretched the Fordham lead.  They had been more aggressive with their relay, aiming to win.  They were second, but they scored 8 points.  So after five events, the score was 71 to 10.

I am going to take some credit for having prepared the boys.  We knew we would start slow.  They had understood our plan.  They seemed unfazed–and all they could really do was give their best efforts and go to work event by event chopping down the big lead.

Fordham Prep’s Christian Doherty won the 55 meter hurdles in 7.95–but he just barely edged our Chris Hawkins who ran a personal best 7.97.  Conor Dunham was fourth in 8.03; Fordham scored 10, but we scored 12.  In the 55 meter dash, our Andrew Eady ran 7.02 for two fifth place points; Fordham scored none.  So after nine of the 15 events, it was still 81 to 24.

To be honest, we were only vaguely aware of the score and the big deficit.  The meet moved much faster than we expected, in an unfamiliar venue with unfamiliar events.  We got very busy making sure boys made it to the event check-in and the starting line on time.  At some meets we track the score—and at some meets, they announce the score as the meet progresses, sometimes simply posting the accrued score on the meet results as they post them on the wall.  At Georgetown we didn’t keep score—and they didn’t announce it.  We just knew we were going to start way, way behind and then we would try to catch up.

When we realized before the meet that we would face that large gap, we had debated whether to be more aggressive with the relays.  We did not do so with the 4×800, but we did with the 4×200–and it was a decision that paid off.  We entered our best team.  Eady, Zeb McLaurin, Hawkins, and Dunham ran 1:35.81 for 8 second place points.  Fordham scored 2 in fifth place.

In the East Coast indoor order of events, unlike in Illinois, the 1600–the old one mile race–comes relatively early in the meet.  That was good for us, because we needed a big momentum changer.  Our number one runner, Jack Keelan, who has a personal best of 4:09 in this event, sat in the pack and came through the half mile in about 2:15.  It was a strategic move to help our other miler, Chris Korabik, stay comfortably in the race against some runners from the other schools who had entered with faster seed times.  We didn’t want Keelan possibly helping other runners to run away from Korabik.  Keelan aggressively moved out to a lead in the third quarter mile, at a point when no one else would be able to follow, and won in a new meet record of 4:25.05.  The plan worked well as Korabik concentrated on beating the remaining runers to finish second in 4:30.52.  That one-two finish scored 18 points; Fordham scored 1.

We lost ground in the 500-meters.  Fordham Prep was third; we scored none.

But when Eliot Kaufmann of New York City’s Xavier High School won the 1000 meters, we finished strong behind him.  Taylor Dugas had challenged Kaufman in the last lap and finished second (2:38.31), Andrew Reardon was third (2:40.64), and Korabik, running with just a short rest, was fourth (2:41.28).  Fordham scored 2 points; Ignatius scored 18.

Eady scored two more points with a fifth place finish in the 300-meters (38.38).

Our original hope had been that we could keep the meet close until the 3200-meter.  We would run Keelan again–and we had kept two strong, younger runners in reserve to join him, freshman Dan Santino and sophomore Andy Weber.  Keelan had felt good in the 1600, and he had really held back, he said.    Before the 3200 he said he wanted to do something special–and he targeted 9:20 as a goal.  Santino and Weber would run together as a team; Keelan would run solo.

Some aggressive early running from Tyler Spear of Baltimore’s Loyola Blakefield School worked fine for Keelan.  Spear raced through the first few laps in first place, running fast splits–31 for 200, 65 for 400.  Then Keelan took over, and he proceeded to run laps of 34 and 35 seconds like clockwork.  That stretched the field out, as a group of four runners gamely chased Keelan.  Santino and Weber, meanwhile, settled into the middle of a second pack, running their own race.

At 1600, Spear and Chris Hoyle from Gonzaga were still holding on as Keelan came through in 4:38.  But then Keelan kept up the steady pace—34 seconds one lap, 35 seconds the next.  He pulled out to a bigger and bigger lead, and then finished with a 31 second last 200, running 4:33 for the second mile for a final time of 9:11.48.

Jack Keelan has one lap to go as he runs 9:11 for 3200 at the Georgetown Prep Jesuit Invite. Behind him Dan Santino and Andy Weber are on their way to 9:56 and 9:57 personal bests. Photo by Steven Bugarin.

Meanwhile, behind him, Santino and Weber were running their own clockwork-like race, knocking off laps of 37 and 38 seconds.  They were 4:56 at the mile, back in seventh and eighth place.  But in the second mile they maintained that same pace, running in tandem, and as some of the runners who had chased Keelan fell off the pace, Santino and Weber moved up to finish fourth and fifth in 9:56.76 and 9:57.59.  It was the first time under 10:00 for both of them.

Fordham did not score in the 3200; Ignatius scored 16.

While we didn’t know at the time, we did figure out later that the 60 point gap had narrowed a lot at that point.  In fact, with two events left, unknown to us, the score stood Fordham 96, Ignatius 86.

Georgetown Prep had clearly targeted the 4×400, no doubt wanting to win the last event in their own meet, and they used their star sprinter Ron Busby on the anchor to win in 3:33.14.  Korabik, in his third race of the day, ran the first leg for us.  He settled into the back of the lead pack of six, and then tried to move up on the second lap; his split of 55.5 seconds had us in fifth, but still close to the lead.  Dugas ran the second leg in 54.0, moving us up a place, and then Reardon ran the third leg in 53.8, aggressively moving us up to third but close to the lead.  Conor Dunham got the baton and rocketed into second over the first 100 meters.  He was racing against Busby, the winner of the 500-meter, and Kaufmann of Xavier, winner of the 1000-meter.  Busby wasn’t going to be caught. Kaufmann passed Dunham back in the next 200 meters, and although he made another run, Dunham couldn’t pass him back.  His split of 52.9 gave the team third place in a season best time of 3:36.28.

Fordham, meanwhile, had finished sixth.  It was a five point swing for us.

The 4×400 is always intended to be the final event of the meet.  But often, instead, it turns out to be the triple jump.  The meet ran so quickly on the track that the jumpers were still finishing—and, as it turns out, they were deciding the meet.

Junior Chris Hawkins scored the second place points in the triple jump (41-08) that completed the Wolfpack’s come from behind win at the Jesuit Invite in the meet’s final event. Photo by Steven Bugarin.

Hawkins was second with a season best jump of 41 feet and 8 inches—and Kyle Robinson was sixth (38-9.75), another point for Ignatius.

As the triple jump was finishing, our Ignatius team assembled on the meet bleachers for a team photo.  It was an important photo for us.

Our special trip to the Jesuit Invite came as a gift from an Ignatius track alumnus, Ray Mayer.  Mayer, from the class of 1951 and now a resident of Fairfax, Virginia, had been a star runner at Ignatius.  Another Ignatius alumnus, Paul O’Shea, was a classmate with Mayer, and he also lives nearby in Fairfax.  O’Shea is a track afficianado and a contributing writer to the Cross Country Journal.  A third member of the class of 1951, Tom Coyne, had begun following our team in the fall, attending the Chicago Catholic League cross country championship meet.  Coyne, who lives in Kalamazoo, MI, scheduled a trip to Maryland to coincide with the Jesuit Invite.

The three knowledgeable track men had watched the meet carefully, with a supportive but also educated and critical eye.  Although I had tried to warn them, I am pretty sure that they were underwhelmed by our slow start in the meet.  I had, in fact, told Mayer back in the fall as he was writing his check to cover the expenses that we had a good chance to win the meet.  At the completion of the 4×800, as gamely as our young boys had run against the top runners from the other schools, Mayer had rightly noted, “We weren’t very competitive in that race.”

We had promised that we would do better as the meet progressed.  And all three men seemed more satisfied with the good results that followed.

All three benefactors took a seat on the bench with the team as we took photographs—and then waited for an announcement of the final team results, which at that point were still a mystery.  The boys had already noted that there were two team trophies available.  “Second place is still a trophy,” I reminded them.  “I think the announcer just took the results from the computer guy.”

It is pretty clear to me that they wanted the final score to carry some suspense.  He announced the score from seventh place down.  “With 12 points in seventh place, Regis.  In sixth place, with 42 points, Loyola Blakefield.”  Xavier scored 50 for fifth.  Gonzaga fourth with 55.  Georgetown Prep third with 74.

“The outcome of the meet came down to the last event,” said the announcer.  “With 97 points, in second place, Fordham Prep.”

I am pretty sure none of the boys heard the rest of the announcement.  It was Ignatius with 101.5 points for the win.

As the boys piled out of the bleachers jumping up and down, Ray Mayer got to feel like a full member of the team when one of the boys accidentally knocked him in the head.  He just smiled at the jubilation around him.

After some celebration on the track, we reassembled the group again in the bleachers and took some more photos, this time with the trophy.

And the next day, on the plane ride home, we took photos of the trophy in the hotel, on the metro, in the airport, and on the plane.

A track adventure in DC

Our Saint Ignatius boys track team is on its way to Washington, DC, high over Ohio or somewhere east of Chicago.

So far so good. We’re on the plane, getting off just before the snow hit Chicago this evening. We had a few anxious moments. We didn’t get off in the bus after school until 3:35; our flight was leaving O’Hare at 6:05. Still plenty of time, it would seem, but every time traffic slowed on the Kennedy it gave me a moment of pause.

Getting boarding passes for our group of 30 wasn’t so difficult. We did wonder what the TSA staff were going to say about the track spikes the boys carried in their bags. We told them carry-on bags only. We weren’t going to check anything. But the TSA didn’t seem to bat an eye at the shoes.

So we were at the gate B6 in the United Terminal by 5:00, with enough time for the boys to find some fast food and then be ready to board the flight at 6:05.

We’re on our way with 21 of our athletes to Washington, DC and Reagan National, where tomorrow evening we will run at the Georgetown Preparatory School’s Jesuit Invitational indoor track meet. This is a first ever event for our team–a meet where we fly to the destination.

We’ve known about the event for a number of years, with annual invitations by email. A few times I’ve emailed back, “Maybe some day, you never know.”

Last summer I was contacted by a group of Ignatius alumni from the class of 1951. This was a group that won several city cross country championships during their high school career, with a bunch of track titles, too. Key members of that old team–and the new team that contacted me–included Tom Coyne, a retired administrator and former vice president at Western Michigan University, and Ray Mayer, who, after a decorated Army career, had a successful career in real estate working in the Northern Virginia and DC area.

They wanted to do something for the team, their emails told me. Our Ignatius development staff asked me to compile some ideas of things we might need and things we might want. The suggestion from Ray Mayer, in particular, had been to send the team on a trip to run somewhere. Where would we want to go?

Our list included a timing clock for the finish line of our track and cross country home meets, a fully automated timing system, some construction work on our track, and because our cross country schedule was pretty settled and full–and we had a weekend free for our track team in February–I added the possibility of taking the team to the Georgetown Prep Jesuit Invite.

While the group of 1951 runners seemed inclined to pursue a project that would have a long-standing impact, Ray Mayer asked me to call him on the phone last September and he offered to bring the team to DC, where he hoped he would be able to watch them run.

So our trip today has been six months in the making. Ray sent a check to the school to cover the airfare and hotel costs. The United Airlines group desk booked our flights. Greg Dunston, the track coach at Georgetown Prep, answered dozens of emails about questions large and small.

We announced the trip to the boys back in December, making it clear that only about 20 of the 70 boys on our team would travel. The qualifying standards were pretty simple. Based on last year’s meet results, we would bring boys who might have a chance to score points for us in the meet.

The names of the boys were due at United Airlines in mid-January, before we had even run a meet. I made some good guesses about who would be ready to run in February, and then after our first couple indoor meets, we made some hard decisions for the final roster spots. It was hard to tell some boys that they could not make the trip.

Tonight we check in at the hotel and get a good night’s sleep. We had planned to take the Metro north to the hotel, outside DC in Gaithersburg, near Georgetown Prep’s Bethesda, MD campus. Greg Dunston came through at the last minute and arranged to pick us up by bus at the airport, saving us a long subway ride.

Tomorrow we have a morning college visit scheduled at Georgetown University–and then the track meet at 4:00.

We’ll check in again after the meet.

An example of how it is not so simple: IHSA changes its rule about non-scholastic track meets

Top Illinois high school athletes traveled to Arcadia High School in California to race in an elite field last spring. Jack Keelan, in the white Saint Ignatius singlet, takes a photo with competitors at the Arcadia Invite on Saturday night, April 7, including Leland Later from New Trier, Michael Clevenger from Decatur MacArthur, Garrett Lee and Tyler Yunk from Belvidere North, and Will Brewster and Luke Zygmunt from Grayslake.

Before Christmas vacation invitations went out to high school athletes for the Brooks PR Invitational, scheduled at the University of Washington in Seattle for Sunday, February 24.  Our senior Jack Keelan, who ran 8:55 for 3200-meters last year and won the Illinois 3A cross country championship in November, heard that two of his NXN Midwest teammates, Sam Wharton from Tippecanoe, Ohio, and Alex Riba from O’Fallon High School, had received special candy bar invitations in the mail, Willy Wonka-style.  Keelan felt a little bit left out.  Inquiries to the meet organizers suggested that he would get an invitation in a second round.  His email invitation came this week.  The candy bar invite was sent to the school, and we are still trying to track it down.

The invitation—with all expenses paid to run in an elite field—poses some difficulties for us.  We have already scheduled a special trip for our team to run in Washington, DC, at the Jesuit Indoor Invitational at Georgetown Prep on Friday night, February 22.  Keelan, obviously, is a big part of our team.

But initially there was no conflict because according to the rules as I understood them, the Brooks PR Invitational was not a meet that would get approval from the IHSA under its “non-scholastic meets” policy, Policy 15 under IHSA rules.  Interpretations of that policy have gone through several revisions in recent years.   The basic rule is that if athletes want to run meets as individuals outside of their team schedules, they must submit an application for approval to the IHSA.   Several years ago the IHSA would only approve meets that were organized and run by the national governing body for track and field—USA Track and Field.  For a few years this included several meets like the New Balance Indoor Nationals conducted by the National Scholastic Sports Foundation Inc. in New York.  But closer scrutiny from the IHSA suggested that these meets were not run by USATF; they were only sanctioned by the national organization.  So for a year or two the IHSA had a much stricter rule, with a list of approved meets that was very small.

This rule has been a point of contention for elite high school track athletes in Illinois.  Most prominently, Carl Sandburg High School’s Lukas Verzbicas, two-time state champion in cross country, never ran in the IHSA track championships at least in part because he gave up his eligibility by participating in those non-approved national meets.

But last year the IHSA directors made a bigger change in the rule, beginning this school year.  Here’s the Dyestat Illinois announcement about that change: http://espn.go.com/blog/high-school/track-and-xc/post/_/id/1809/illinois-makes-rule-change-regarding-sanctioned-meets.

Yesterday at the annual Illiniois Track and Cross Country Association coaches’ clinic held at Oak Park-River Forest High School,  IHSA assistant director Ron McGraw explained the liberalization of the rule.  I haven’t been able to find this written down anywhere on the IHSA web site, but McGraw told coaches at an open forum that now Illinois athletes can run all the meets in question in recent years–the New Balance Indoor Nationals (previously the NIKE Indoor Nationals) conducted by the National Scholastic Sports Foundation Inc. in New York, the Millrose Games, New York, the Reebok Indoor Games, Boston, the newer Brooks PR Invitational in Seattle. A form signed by the school principal must still be submitted to the IHSA ahead of time, but schools do not have to submit proof of this USATF approval, as in the past. It was even unclear to me whether USATF sanction was required.  It will be up to coaches and athletes to decide how these meets fit into the plans of the athletes training plans and their participation in team activities.

In other words, under this new interpretation of the rule, Lukas Verzbicas would have been eligible to run in the IHSA state track meet two years ago.

It will also mean that Jack Keelan and his coach will have conversations in order to make some decisions about his training and competition schedule in February.

The issues are really pretty complex.  In terms of competition and training, mid-February is an early date for a national class competition according to our training schedule.  February is usually a low-key month.  Last year Keelan did not run his first serious indoor race until mid-March.  In early April he was ready to run his 8:55 at the Arcadia High School Invitational in California.

There is also the problem of team commitment.  The meet at Georgetown Prep in February will not be as glamorous as the Brooks PR Invitational.  But it is a special event for our team, and we will run against the top Jesuit high schools on the East Coast—Georgetown Prep and Gonzaga from the DC-area, Regis, Xavier, and Fordham Prep from New York.  We are going to the meet to try and win the meet.  Keelan knows his teammates—and his coaches–want him there.

On the other hand, Keelan has earned the invitation to Seattle.

For some coaches, the decision would be easy.  As a member of the team, Keelan should compete with the team.  But there would be others, however, who would say that in terms of developing a national class athlete, the trip to Seattle could be an important step.

Keelan and I will talk this week.  It occurs to me that one approach might be to ask the question, what would Missy Franklin do?  Franklin, an Olympic gold medalist last summer, is swimming for her high school team at Regis Jesuit High School in Colorado.   On the other hand, it is not a fair question.  Franklin has been to the Olympics; she has taken the steps to become a world-class athlete, and she has had that experience.  Keelan is still trying to navigate that road to become an elite athlete; for Keelan, events like the Brooks PR meet are tests for him on that road.

This seems like a perfect post for this blog.  Running is not so simple.

Auld Lang Syne

He’s got him on his back: A Saint Ignatius track guy climbs on his teammate’s shoulders as the  Wolfpack wins the 2012 Chicago Catholic League Indoor Track Championship last March. Photo by Steven Bugarin.

A few weeks ago I got a message from a former runner at Saint Ignatius College Prep asking me for a track team t-shirt.  He explained that he was volunteering for an organization for mentally challenged adults, working as a buddy with a young man who liked our former runner’s stories about our team.  I have a box of old shirts—usually when our team orders gear I have a few extras left over—and I sent one off.

I got a voice mail a couple days later with an enthusiastic thank you for the shirt.  He had just had his buddy time for the week, and our former runner went on for a minute about how his buddy had loved the shirt—and how his buddy had loved the idea that he could now be a part of our team, too.

Contact with our alumni runners is often even less formal and fleeting.  This is my tenth year of coaching at Saint Ignatius, and so the alumni base of boys that I have coached probably numbers around 200 or so.  About half of that group is now out of college; about half are still in school.  They range in age now from 18 to 27 or so.  The group now includes doctors and lawyers in training, a nurse, a pedacab driver, a Marine, artists and musicians, engineers, bankers, and graduate students.

If I had to graph the status of those ongoing relationships after graduation against time out of school, I tend to hear more often from the younger guys—usually when they stop by for visits at school during college vacations.  But I am Facebook friends with some of these former runners, and I hear from them by email with good wishes before big events and congratulations after big successes from time to time.  Some of them read this blog from time to time, or they keep up with the team through information posted on the school web pages and publications for alumni.

Last summer my wife and I bumped into one of our former runners when we were out to dinner.  Peggy had been coaching with me when this young man was on the Saint Ignatius track and cross country teams.  We had a nice short talk.  He was graduated from college and ready to move on with some new opportunities in his life.   We told him about the successes of our team.

A couple weeks ago a bereavement email to the Saint Ignatius community gave us sad news of this young man’s death.

The circumstances of his death are difficult and hard to talk about.  His funeral was a profoundly sad event, as former schoolmates and teachers and a few teammates gathered with his family and other friends to say goodbye.  He was remembered as a young man of special kindness and generosity, who had lived his life with a spirit of genuine joy and friendship.  His years at Saint Ignatius College Prep were special to him–especially his friends from that time.

It was the first funeral for me of a runner that I had coached.

After a year in which our Saint Ignatius track and cross country teams had great success, these two end of the year events with former runners remind me that we coach to prepare and teach our athletes for the lives they have ahead of them—and we have great hopes for those lives.  It gives me an occasion to reflect on my work as a coach and as a teacher for the last ten years.

As a teacher I spend a little bit more than three hours a week with the 100 or so students in the classroom, usually for one school year.  I spend probably fifteen hours a week with the 70 or so boys that I coach, and for about 30 of these boys that is for seven months of the year—and for four years.  Sometimes I teach AND coach the same boys.  As one boy told me once, “I spend more time with you, Coach Ernst, than I spend with my parents!”

It is on my list of things to do for next year to think about how to keep in better touch with these old friends.

It ain’t over until it is over

Saint Ignatius senior Jack Keelan finished 26th at the Nike Cross Nationals on Saturday, December 1, running the muddy five kilometer course at Portland Meadows in 17 minutes and 45 seconds. Photo by Tim Keelan.

The cross country season is (dare I say, finally) over as all the members of our team have finished their post-season races.

These races—the Nike Cross Nationals series which crowns a national team champion, as well as an individual winner, and the older Foot Locker series which crowns an individual national champ—present some special problems for Illinois high school cross country coaches, including the simple problem that according to a complicated set of Illinois High School Association rules we are not able to coach our runners in these races.

A round-up of the Saint Ignatius results:  With his 26^th place finish at NXN on Saturday, December 1 in a time of 17 minutes and 45 seconds on a muddy five kilometer course in Portland, Saint Ignatius senior and 2012 Illinois 3A state champion Jack Keelan has run his last high school cross country race. (Complete results here.)

The Saint Ignatius boys ran in the NXN Midwest qualifier as the Pack-Men, and paid homage in their team design to their love of video games.

Keelan had qualified for NXN with a fifth place finish at the NXN Midwest regional qualifier at the windy and winding Lavern Gibson Championship course in Terra Haute, IN, on Sunday, November 11.  Our Ignatius team ran there as a club called the Pack-Men, finishing 20^th out of 37 top Midwest high school teams.   Keelan ran 15 minutes and 34 seconds, a personal best for five kilometers and 44 seconds better than last year.  Freshman Dan Santino ran 16:49, 155^th out of 346 finishers.  Junior Chris Korabik was close behind in 175^th, running 16:55—more than 1:30 better than last year.  Sophomore Andrew Weber ran 17:09 for 218^th—another 1:30 improvement,  sophomore Brian Santino 18:15 for 323^rd—one minute faster,  and senior Ray Lewis 19:06 for 338^th.

Keelan, Dan Santino, and Brian Santino also raced at the Foot Locker Midwest qualifier held at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside on Saturday, November 20.  Dan Santino finished fourth, as the top freshman, in the frosh-soph race with a time of 16:24 for five kilometers—a personal best, and brother Brian Santino ran 18:50 for 104^th out of 193.  In the seeded race, Keelan finished a disappointing 84^th, running 16:05–more on that race below.

The Pack-Men at NXN Midwest in Terra Haute, IN. Photo by Tim Keelan.

Technically and honestly, I am not coaching the team in this post-season period.  The Illinois High School Association rules are a little bit confusing and murky about whether I could be the coach of the club team or the individual performers in these post season races.  I did go to Terra Haute and to Wisconsin-Parkside to watch them run—and at Parkside, I went to run a race on the same course myself.  But I did not go to Portland to watch Keelan run—and perhaps I missed a once in a lifetime event, even if I would have been an outsider at the event.

Keelan and his teammates have been essentially training on their own since the November 3 Illinois state meet.  He and the team did train for the post-season following an outline of workouts that I gave Keelan back in August, spelling out a 24-week plan that ran through to December.

We had planned the workouts so that Keelan would train hard until just before the state meet, when he would begin a competition phase of training—what coaches call a peak.

For the six weeks previously in September and October, the hard workouts of the week presumably left Keelan a little bit tired when it came time to race on the weekends.  He took very few days off during this time.  He ran about 60 miles each week, with a long run of 12 or even a few more miles on Sundays.  Mondays was a workout in which he ran 1000-meter or 800-meter repeats at about his goal race pace—3:00 for 1000, 2:22 for 800—with a rest about equal to the length of the interval.  On Wednesdays he ran mile repeats, usually about five, at a tempo pace of between 5:00 and 5:10 per mile, with a one-minute rest between.

But for the last month of his season, from a week before the state meet through to December, the number of miles he ran decreased a little bit and the workouts were less demanding.   Mondays were a combination of intervals, including some faster 200-meter sprints; Wednesdays were fewer tempo miles, with some 200s.  He took a few days off.  It was clear that some of these big races and big efforts took a lot out of him.

One key to Keelan’s success this fall—and a lesson we have tried to convey to his teammates—is that we identified manageable pacing goals for the workouts that tested him but did not deplete him.  He has avoided the common mistake of over-training—or what might be called “racing in practice.”  Especially at the end of the season, the emphasis has been on the weekend races, not the training sessions.

It was the first time as a coach that I have had to plan for an extended post-season schedule.  It was a tricky thing to do,  because the event that was most important, really—the Illinois state meet—came before the qualifying and national events for NXN and the Foot Locker cross country championship.  Although for the future I will look at this again and think it through after evaluating the results of the last month, I really do think we planned the workout schedule correctly, in terms of Keelan’s physical preparation.

What we hadn’t thought about very carefully, however, was the mental challenge that Keelan would face this last month.  After winning the Illinois state meet and running a spectacular time of 14 minutes and 5 seconds on November 3, it seems likely to me that he found it a little bit difficult to find the motivation to dig as deep and push himself as hard in the qualifying races at the NXN Midwest and at the Foot Locker Midwest.   He might disagree, perhaps.

Outside of Illinois—and perhaps even among the college coaches doing their recruiting—these national meets seem most important.  But here in Illinois, winning the state meet was a big deal.  At a school like Ignatius, where we have seldom even had runners qualify for the state meet, it was even a bigger deal.  And if you followed Keelan’s bigger story, with its disappointing chapter last year when he did not even qualify for the state meet after having been touted among the favorites to win when he was a junior, then you can probably understand how much his win on November 3 meant to him.

At the NXN Midwest race, it was a windy day on the challenging inclined course at the Lavern Gibson facility.  Keelan was touted as one of the clear race favorites after winning the Illinois state meet the week before.  He sat in the pack for the first half of the race, and then at about the half-way point—an uphill stretch with the wind behind him—he moved to the front of the race and began to push.  It was more or less the same strategy he had followed the week before in the Illinois state meet.

But this time, it seemed, Keelan didn’t have the same big engine.  I likened it to the moment in Star Wars when Han Solo hits the button to send the Millenium Falcon into the hyperdrive jump to light speed—and it doesn’t work.  Keelan did regroup, however, and did a good job of race management.  He settled into the small chase pack that followed a successful separation move by Sam Wharton of Ohio, who countered Keelan’s push and then kept moving after Keelan’s effort stalled.  Wharton’s move created a selection in the bigger field, and in the last half mile of the race seven runners were fighting for the five qualifying spots.  Keelan would have to rely on a finishing kick strategy.  Alex Riba of O’Fallon High School in Illinois, who had challenged Keelan for more than two and a half miles at Detweiller Park the previous week, finally ran Wharton down to win the NXN Midwest with a strong finish over the last 200 meters, but Keelan qualified a few steps behind in fifth to go to Portland.  Quentin Shaffer of Prospect High School, runner up to Keelan at the Illinois state meet, was a third Illinois qualifier with his fourth-place finish.

Two weeks later at the Foot Locker Midwest qualifier, Keelan’s result was not as good.  Parkside was a much more challenging course in terms of its hills.  The first 600 meters or so of the race, in fact, are a long uphill—much more severely than anything at Terra Haute, even.  But after coasting downhill on grass toward the mile mark, the rest of the course is run on a rolling, hard-packed trail with some pretty severe uphills and fast downhills.  Keelan made a visit to the course with teammates—freshman Dan Santino and junior Taylor Dugas—the week before on his one free weekend of the last month, and he ran some tempo miles on the hills.   For a few weeks he also did part of his workout on Bobsled Hill near Soldier Field on the Chicago lakefront—a grassy, steep incline of 100-meters or so.  But in retrospect it probably wasn’t enough preparation for the pounding of the Parkside course.

Keelan sat back in the pack for the first mile.  When Riba, Wharton, and Jake Leingang of North Dakota made a separating push at the front of the race, Keelan did not keep up—but he moved up in the pack and he was running in fifth place at the two-mile point.  But after a hard and fast downhill, the course went vertical again—and Keelan later said he just couldn’t get his legs to go up the big hill.  He jogged into the finish line in 60^th place.  Riba cracked a little bit later in the race, falling back to 30^th.

Whether it was a physical or mental lack of readiness remains a good question.  Keelan trained for the FLMW with freshman Santino, who ran the frosh soph race at Parkside.  Santino sat back in his race through the mile.  He was in about twelfth place as the pack strung out over the next mile.  And then over the same hills that had been too much for Keelan, Santino surged to finish fourth in 16 minutes and 24 seconds for five kilometers—a great outcome for a freshman on that challenging course.  The same training on Bobsled Hill seemed to have adequately prepared Santino for the hilly Parkside course.

Keelan went to Portland, therefore, with something to prove.  A preview for the NXN race by Steve Underwood for Milesplit.com listed Keelan as an honorable mention among the star-studded field but not among the 13 favorites who held top 25 rankings according to Underwood’s list, with the note that he needed to save his post-season with a good race:  “Trying now to salvage a disappointing post-season.”   Another national ranking, the Bill Meylan index, tries to measure the difficulty of different courses and different race performances against each other; this list had Keelan’s combined efforts at the Illinois state meet and the NXN Midwest race ranked at number 13 among the contenders at NXN.

The epic sloppiness of the already notoriously muddy and wet course in Portland, with hay bales to jump and the so-called woop-de-dos speed bump hills late in the race, presented Keelan with another kind of entirely different cross country challenge from anything he had ever experienced before.

Keelan eats lunch after NXN with Illinois Olympian Evan Jager and race winner and Midwest teammate Sam Wharton. Photo by Tony Jones.

Reports from Portland say that Keelan became friends there with Ohio’s Sam Wharton, who turned out to be the surprise winner of the race.  They were members of the Midwest individuals team, who were chaperoned by Chicago’s Lane Tech assistant coach Tony Jones.  Jones posted on Twitter photos of Keelan and Wharton eating lunch together after the race with Illinois Olympian Evan Jager.  (Jones’s Twitter posts here.)  Wharton was the only one of the five member Midwest group to have run at NXN the year before, and Jones dubbed him the team captain.  Jones posted other photos of Keelan and the team, obviously having a great time together.

Nike broadcast the race over the internet on a special Facebook page.  There were some pre-race segments with videos and photos of the participants from the festivities on Friday.  Keelan’s smiling face showed up a couple of times, including a shot of the Midwest individuals running on the course.

It was hard to pick him out of the crowded field once the race began.  The internet broadcast site did allow you to type in a name, and it produced the chip timing splits at one, two, three, and four kilometers.  So we did get to see Keelan’s race develop.  He was 32^nd at the one kilometer, in a fast time of 2:32, a couple seconds or so at that point behind the leaders.  The subsequent kilometer splits slowed dramatically, as the runners hit the muddy and puddle sections of the course.  But Keelan stayed near the lead for kilometers two and three, and moved up slowly, reaching 22^nd .   At four kilometers he had fallen farther off the pace of the leaders, as Sam Wharton made his strong move to win the race, but he kept his place.  Over the last kilometer he lost a few spots at the end.  The broadcast did show him crossing the finish line, with a bunch of runners just in front and just behind him.  It had apparently been a frantic closing kilometer.

Keelan’s 26^th place finish was a perfectly respectable performance on an extreme day in terms of both its competitive pressure and the course conditions.  The Tracktalk.net elite high school board has been rocking with complaints about the course conditions, with the focus on the disruption of form in the individual race, where the top four favorites going into the race all finished outside of the top 10—New York’s Nick Ryan finished 17^th after a fall at the start, Arizona’s Bernie Montoya 22^nd, West Virginia’s Jacob Burcham 84^th, and North Dakota’s Jake Leingang 59^th.   Comments after the race sounded like horse race handicappers—the course is built on the infield of the Portland Meadows race track—with its discussion of mudders and not-mudders.   Quentin Shaffer of Illinois and another of Keelan’s Midwest teammates was clearly a mudder, finishing 12^th overall, a great finish to his breakthrough year as a runner.

But while I might be wrong, you also have to guess that Shaffer would swap his two wins over Keelan in the NXN races for the state meet victory.  After winning the state meet, Keelan was never in a position where he had to salvage his season, whatever Steve U thinks.

We can expect some epic battles in the spring when all these runners take their talents to the track.