It’s been a busy couple of weeks here in Collegeville with our third race of the season at the UW Eau Claire Blugold Invitational, Homecoming Weekend and the 2024 Hall of Honor ceremony, plus the latest St. Michael’s Games event of the season - the egg toss - all occurring since my last blog post. Recaps are below.

We are excited to head to Rock Island, Illinois this weekend for the Augustana Interregional Invitational where we will be competing against 42 other teams, with many of them ranked nationally. It will be a great chance for us to line up with some of the best teams in the country, plus it will be our first look at Macalester who I think we will be competing very closely with as we get into championship season here. And of course the guys always have a lot of fun on the overnight trips, too.

Enjoy the post below and I’ll talk to you in a couple weeks before the MIAC Championships!

-Maxwell

UW EAU CLAIRE BLUGOLD INVITATIONAL RECAP

First, we’ll start with a recap of the Eau Claire meet. The results for our top 5 are in the accompanying photo above, and the full results can be found here.

This was a very good step forward for us. Every single guy ran faster than they did two weeks ago at St. Olaf and over half the team ran all-time PRs. There may have been a 20ish degree swing in the weather from St. Olaf (in a good way), but Tim and I are just chalking up so many great performances to good coaching…

More so than the fast times everyone ran, because I am constantly trying to get guys away from paying too much attention to times in cross country due to the varying course conditions / course accuracy, what I was most proud of was HOW our guys ran and executed the race. All but two of our guys, who are both returning from injury and still getting their fitness back, finished higher up than they were at the one mile mark, and almost everybody’s last mile was faster than their first mile. Fantastic. Also a great sight to see was that 29 of our 31 guys on the team this fall raced — meaning only two were not able to race due to injury.

HOMECOMING WEEKEND & HALL OF HONOR INDUCTION

As many of you know, Homecoming weekend was a big weekend for us as we celebrated Tim, Chuck Ceronsky ‘70 and Mike Fahey’s ‘75 inductions into the SJU Hall of Honor. I was so excited to see so many alumni come back to partake in the weekend’s festivities, with around 50 alumni joining us at cross country practice that morning to interview Chuck & Tim and go for a run on campus (a few photo and video highlights below), as well as around another 40 alumni who were able to join us at the Hall of Honor dinner that evening. We are grateful to have so many supportive and involved alumni, and it was great to meet some of you who I had never met before. Each inductee was brought up onto stage for a 10ish minutes Q&A session, and you can watch each of Tim, Chuck and Mike’s daughter’s (who accepted the award on Mike’s behalf) time on stage at this video below.

Fast forward to the following times in the video for each inductee: Chuck 26:10, Mike 54:25 and Tim 1:33:55.

2024 Hall of Honor Induction Ceremony

And a few photos from the big day:

ST. MICHAEL’S GAMES UPDATE - egg toss

Perhaps the most prestigious event to win as well as the event with the most build up and fanfare preceding it every year is the Egg Toss. One of my favorite things about our program is that we (meaning Tim) have maintained our all-time best egg toss hang times list just as meticulously as our actual all-time fastest marks lists for each event in cross country and track & field. The egg toss list as it stands in 2024 is below:

In this year’s competition, we had our defending champions from last year Ethan Leonard and AJ Skinner (whose banquet award this year will have to be something related to Lynyrd Skynyrd I think…) looking to replicate their 2023 magic. However, recording the 11th best mark in egg toss history, sophomores Vincent Kaluza (Rocori) and Connor O’Brien (Belle Plaine) came away with the title with their toss of 3.27 seconds. Team wise, Team “Watab” again came away victorious with a total hang time from their team members of 9.42 seconds. It is also worth nothing that we had two winning pairs of our Bricks for Mitts Award this year — Aidan Thomas (Totino Grace) & AJ Karn (Wayzata) and Aiden Chalmers (Minnetonka) & Jaymis Bauer (Rocori). Both pairs dropped and broke their egg on their very first toss. Tim and I weren’t mad at them, just disappointed.

Liam Sheeley (Holy Angels) and Nick St. Peter’s (Maple Grove) Egg Toss

Aidan Thomas (Totino-Grace) and Joe Gathje (Bloomington Jefferson) Exhibition Toss

Nate Courchane (Park Center) & Liam Sheeley Exhibition Toss

After the main egg toss-ing was over, we still had seven eggs left and I had noticed on our all-time list that there was a section for the Exhibition Solo Toss, where a guy both throws and catches his egg, and the record was 2.59 by Phil Potvin in 1997. So, I opened it up to the guys to take a crack at it. First up was Joe Gathje and Max McCoy, neither of whom were able to successfully catch their egg. Next, Connor Dow and Aidan Thomas gave it a shot — both also unsuccessful. Then, Eamon Cavanaugh (Oak Park-River Forest, Ill.) gets up there and throws/catches his egg with a hang time of 2.84. School record! And the crowd goes wild! Sadly, Eamon’s record wouldn’t last too long as Ethan Leonard (Chaska) got up there immediately following Eamon and proceeded to successfully throw/catch his egg four times, each time beating Eamon’s new/old record — 3.00s, 3.25s, 3.41s and 3.43s. With all this being said, I have no idea if Phil Potvin reads this blog or not, but sorry Phil. Your record is toast! Rumor is that Ethan immediately called home to his parents to tell them the good news.

The first few Exhibition Solo Toss attempts by Joe Gathje, Max McCoy, Connor Dow and Aidan Thomas

Ethan Leonard’s record breaking Exhibition Solo Tosses

To take this eventful story a step further, after the guys were all done and were off on their run, Tim and I were cleaning up the egg cartons, etc. and noticed that there was in fact one more egg underneath one of the cartons that the guys apparently missed. After unsuccessfully trying to get Tim to do the egg toss with me to establish an official Coaches Record, I figured I might as well see what I can do in an Exhibition Solo Toss myself. I’ll let you all watch the video below (taken by a couple of our injured guys who weren’t running that day) to find out what my time was, and I’ll close this section of the blog with one of Tim’s quotes from after he went bowling with the team once and had the highest score — “of course I won, I’m the coach!”.

BONUS LAUGH #1

This first video is from Tim’s interview at practice on the morning of the Hall of Honor when somebody asked the question - “How do you sell a deaf man a chicken?” and Tim decided to tell an unsuspecting Chuck Ceronsky, fresh off his own interview, the answer.

BONUS LAUGH #2

The second video is also from our cross country practice on the morning of the Hall of Honor when, immediately upon arriving, Michael Collins ‘15, Charlie Raasch ‘18 and Tommy Feichtinger ‘15, who were all distance runners at SJU, decided it would be a good idea to race a 60m dash on the indoor track. Who knows how long it had been since any of them sprinted, and keep in mind that Tommy is our 1500m school record holder with his 3:48.46 from 2015. After you watch the video you’ll see just how significant Tommy’s fall from grace has been since graduating…

“I don’t move that fast anymore” - Tommy Feichtinger, October 2024

BONUS LAUGH #3

Tim’s commentary after a not very impressive exhibition egg toss…

RADIO INTERVIEWS on 2024 cc season

Lastly, myself, current senior Eamon Cavanaugh and current sophomore Vincent Kaluza have all been interviewed this fall by Mark Lewandowski from the local radio station WBHR “The Bear” AM660 for the Johnnie Magazine pre-game show that airs before SJU football games. I figured I’d attach the audio clips of those interviews if anyone cares to listen to us talk about the 2024 cross country season thus far. Each of the interviews are about 7 minutes long.