Weekend action for Escalon’s cross country runners saw them travel to the Calaveras County Fairgrounds on Saturday, Sep. 16, where they competed at the Frogtown Invite.
This was a day to try some different race strategies and preview the subsection course, which the runners will compete on later in the season.
Starting the day off was the freshman boys race and it featured a breakout run by Conner Jones, who finished with a personal record of 13:07 and third place overall on the hilly 2-mile course. Luke Konradi finished in 14:36 and Kenneth Vargas in 15:27, both within seconds of their TVL 1 time a couple weeks prior.
“The Frogtown course does have the biggest hills we will see this season, and so we would expect a similar effort to be slower at Frogtown compared to our TVL course,” said Escalon head coach Michael Bower. “To see a group of kids be within 15 seconds of their TVL time, is a sure sign that they are in fact running faster.”
The frosh-soph girls race was combined D3, 4 and 5. Escalon finished third as a team among D4 schools and were led by Madelyn Fahey who ran 17:16 and was 31st overall and 12th among D4 runners. The team was rounded out by four freshmen: Leigh Garside (18:22), Amanda Mortenson (18:28), Athena Quiroz (18:37) and Carli Jones (19:11)
In the JV races, junior Christopher Garcia matched his time from TVL 1 running 18:48, and junior Jocelyn Espinoza ran 18:02 to finish 18th in the race and senior Faith Reyes ran a personal record of 20:47.
Down a couple of runners and trying some different race strategies, the varsity girls took second among D4 schools on the 3-mile course. Their first five were freshman Kylie Fast (22:30), junior Lauren Rodriguez (23:47), freshman Victoria Calderon (24:32), junior Charlotte Shaddix (25:29), and senior Destiny Reyes (27:50).
In a similar situation, the varsity boys took fourth place as a team among D4 schools, with the top five being senior Andrew Morales (18:39), senior Jose Calderon (18:51), junior Nate Millard (20:42), senior Marcos Grajeda (20:34) and junior Jake Sawyer (23:28).
“We came off of a hard week of training, some of us were a little beat up, some of us were trying a new race strategy, some of us were in our first cross country race ever, and all of us were a little tired,” Bower noted. “But the focus of this race was to learn. To practice our warm up and cool down routines. To practice our mid-race adjustments. To practice having a positive mindset. To be focused more on these other details than the time on the clock, it was icing on the cake for some of our athletes to set some personal bests and great times.”
Next up, the squads will head back to River Bluff Regional Park for the second showdown of TVL runners on Wednesday, Sept. 27.
