While the “normal” person might spend the Friday night before the start of fall break packing up, us cross country nuts make the pilgrimage over to Cartersville for Wingfoot, run or watch running till well past Ben Winn’s bedtime and then hope to make it home before midnight. The real party animals threw in a Waffle House stop before heading to bed.

But I’m guessing there are few regrets as many headed off to fall break with new PR’s or season’s best performances, and with just two more races until region, that’s some good confidence to carry into the rest of the season.

I heard someone refer to the Wingfoot course as “fast-ish” and I kind of get that.  There are not big hills but there are some ups and downs and it has a lot of turns, so I think it really comes down to the atmosphere and the competition that brings out great performances here. From a spectator standpoint, the layout of the course makes it tough to see the race unfold.  If you go out toward the first loop, you get to see them twice in the first 1000 meters, but then you will not see them until they have less than a mile to go. But if you head out toward the mile mark, you are kind of out in no man’s land so you’re basically racing the runners to get back to a place to see them again, which is never fun.  And unless you camp out (with everyone else) at the hay bales, the lighting elsewhere is good enough for the runners to see where their going, but not good enough for a man in his mid-50’s with poor eyesight to try to pick out South jerseys in a pack as they race by at 8-12 mph in the dark.

What’s the point of the above ramble? I saw all the races and all the runners, most at least a few times, but I can’t say I’ve got a great feel for how a race unfolded, when people made moves or fell back or the normal details that I try to share in these newsletters.  So I’m going to change things up this week and just give a bit of a mashup of results, facts and impressions from Wingfoot.

Let me run down the team performances first.  As I mentioned last week, South had the benefit of being in the championship races, but that also meant they met the toughest competition and it showed in the team standings.  Despite some great times and solid racing, South finished a little deeper than they are used to.  The varsity boys had the best showing in 12th place, with the JV boys in 13th.  The varsity girls finished 20th, while the JV girls took 18th.

One note for the curious out there - the live results link is still available (listed on the Wingfoot results page on Milesplit, but also pasted here for your convenience) and has a lot of cool info - your times and places at 5 different points in the race, so you can see where you moved up or lost ground.  https://results.leonetiming.com/xc.html?mid=5773

In terms of individual performances, let’s start with our frontrunners, Ben Winn and Izzy Yonas. Both nabbed impressive top 10 finishes while running remarkably even splits throughout the race, but the two races looked very different.  While a lead pack of 4 broke away in the girl’s race, Izzy got herself in the next group, was 10th at the mile and picked off a couple more to take 7th place with not much drama at the finish. Ben let the lead pack go and just trusted people to come back, which worked well.  He was sitting 24th at the mile, but had climbed all the way to 7th by the 2-mile.  After that it was a dogfight, as he dropped back a spot at one point before climbing up to 6th and managed to hold off a hard charge from Lambert’s Jackson Hogsed as Ben held 6th by just one-tenth of a second. It may not have been a PR for Izzy, but was her 2nd fastest 5k ever, while Ben landed a huge 22-second PR, running 15:30.5

Looking at the rest of the varsity girls, what stood out to me was consistency. Including Izzy, every South girl finished within 10 spots of where they were at the mile, so while I have no doubt the racing was intense in those packs, the change in the end was minimal. South had 451 points at the mile and ended with 442, so we almost could have ended the race at the mile and saved everyone some unnecessary stress. But that would not have allowed some of the great times we did see, with Danielle Schmuckal and Ava Wright both putting up season’s best times and Susan Price and Pratima Yellayi racing to new PRs.

Looking at the guy’s varsity race, what I really see is potential. On top of Ben’s great race, Wyatt Longstreth came back from a disappointing meet at Milton to have his best showing of the season, not only from a time standpoint, but also in terms of racing, as he started outside of the top 100 and climbed at every point in the race to wind up 80th with what I believe is his first time as South’s 2nd runner. Rishi Nagappan had quite a night with a big PR, as did Camden Coker, who cracked 18 minutes for the first time and lowered his PR time by 38 seconds. If I mash together the best performances from Milton and Wingfoot, you are looking at a really strong top 7. But South has yet to have all 7 runners at the top of their game in the same race and with as loaded as 7A-region 6 is, they have a couple more meets to solidify as a team and ensure they are on the right side of things at region.

Looking at the JV races, all I can say is WOW! South had 17 girls and 23 guys run and they delivered 11 season’s bests and an unbelievable 20 new PR’s. Grant Longstreth had an incredible race that saw him run down 30 runners in the last 2 miles as he just missed out on a top 20 finish, taking 21st with a new PR. And special shoutout to Pierson Long and Jaxson Herman who both PR’d for the 3rd time this season. But here’s a rundown of all the new PR’s:

Katie Wilusz, Nithya Jakinipali, Saanvi Rambole, Aanya Kungwani, Rahini Venkapally & Chaeryn Song on the girls side and Collin Hardy, Yash Panchal, Anubhav Behera, Ryan Gorgone, Ethan Lava, Lucas Rymer, Rushil Roy-Chowdhury, Kelvin Gao, Vishwa Lingatlu, Shreyas Jukalkar & Isaac Coates.  Congrats everyone!

Early to bed for this one, folks!  While official assignments have not been made yet, South has historically been in the Purple race, which kicks off with the varsity boys at 7:45 a.m. Add in the fact that the Clinton Farms Nature Preserve sits ~25 miles west of Atlanta out I-20 and I think you can count on a very early bus departure. Look at it this way, it’s just prepping you for Coach Wood the following week, which is even further out.

There should be great competition. As we get into the last month of the season, the teams competing should be running full squads. There is in-region rivals Lambert and Denmark as well as strong teams from Marietta, Walton & Cambridge. The course is two loops, so if you stay up by the start/finish area you’ll just get a couple views, but for the adventurous, there are some short-cuts through the woods that let you catch them a few more times.

I hope to see you in Villa Rica!