MIAC CHAMPIONSHIPS PREVIEW
Championship season is upon us, and we couldn’t be more excited for the gun to go off this Saturday at the MIAC Championships, which is at 11:00AM for the women and 12:00PM for the men at St. Olaf by the way. While we are a young team with just one senior in our top five, we have been running well this fall and I’m excited to see us mix it up with the rest of the conference.
St. Olaf once again has a very strong team this year, and the race between them, us, Carleton and Macalester is looking like it will be very exciting to watch. Our guys are healthy and feeling great, and I have all the trust in the world that they are going to execute a smart race. Then, we’ll see how the results shake out. Hope to see you there on Saturday!
And happy halloween!
-Maxwell
ILLINOIS TRIP RECAP
Two weeks ago we traveled to Rock Island, IL for Augustana College’s Interregional Invitational, which has become one of the “super meets” that teams travel to for their middle of October meet. They had two races, with our top 12 going in the “Gold” race and the rest of our team in the “Blue” race. Including us, there were 40 teams in the Gold race.
While we had never seen the course before, I assumed that if Augustana was allowing 40 teams of 12 guys each to all be in one race that the course would be wide enough to hold that many runners. Well, I was wrong. About 500m into the race the course narrowed significantly while athletes also had to dodge three different trees that were right in the middle of the course. This proved problematic for a field of over 400 runners. We managed to escape mostly unharmed, but with all the congestion the field got out to a relatively slow start.
Our guys moved up tremendously throughout the race, and we ended up finishing 17th ahead of UW-Oshkosh and Macalester who were both ranked ahead of us going into the meet. You can see the results from our top five above and the team standings below, as well as a few photos from the meet. Full results here.
FIELD OF DREAMS MOVIE SITE
On the way down to Augustana, we watched the movie Field of Dreams in preparation for our post-race stop at the actual location where the movie was filmed in Dyersville, Iowa. After some time in the cornfield and a few innings of pickup baseball, we were back on the bus and on our way back to SJU. A few funny photos and videos below, including an at-bat from our very own Tim Miles.
Freshman Colin Berg, still in uniform with his race bib on, throwing batting practice
“Shoeless Joe” Gathje at the plate
ST. MICHAEL’S GAMES UPDATE - PUMPKIN CARVING CONTEST
From left to right: 2nd place, 1st place, 3rd place, 4th place
In our last event before the grand finale that is the cross country banquet, where about half of the St. Michael’s Games events occur, we did a pumpkin carving contest earlier this week at practice. Each team got one knife, one pumpkin and 20 minutes to carve away. Tim and I served as the official judges and in the end it was the team Los Comodores who came away victorious with their carving of an SJU cross country singlet into their pumpkin. Photos of each team with their pumpkins are below.
1st Place - Los Comodores
SJU XC Singlet
2nd Place - Team Watab
“Dumbo”
3rd Place - Beginner’s Luck
Regular “Jack-O-Lantern”
4th Place - Team Beans
Impression of current junior Nick St. Peter after eating at the Reef
Hope to see you Saturday at the conference meet, but if nothing else you can follow along on the live results here as well: MIAC Championships - Nov 2, 2024 | Fast Finish Results
Maxwell
