Our 2020 track and field season has come to an abrupt halt. Very heartbreaking, especially for our seniors. The Distance Team has been training exceedingly well, maybe better than ever, considering the high number of PR’s in the early going, and since we typically train as a late season surging team, who knows what marks we could have hit. At this point, a return to action is not happening, so our “early season re-cap” is pretty much our “season re-cap”.
Early season meets provide a good, low-key opportunity to get into the race day routine. PR’s are not usually expected, but a number of our freshmen hit lifetime bests, primarily due to a solid cross country base and then committing to winter conditioning.
It is less common for returning runners to PR this early, but we had a few …
800
James Bowen, Aidan Ransford, and Connor Jacoby. Jason Finta knocked out a 2:04 PR at our last gasp Whitney Time Trial on our final Thursday together as a team. Super fast! And maybe he’s our varsity 800m guy for next year (?)
1600
Nico Lucas, Connor Jacoby, Jason Finta, Ethan Dodge, and Brenden Jacoby (with an impressive 4:27) all improved on their previous high school best. A pre-season goal for our program was for 18 guys to break 5 minutes. We hadn’t even kicked into training yet, and 13 boys posted sub-5 marks. And that’s not counting runners who broke 5 last year but hadn’t even raced the 1600 yet this season. On the girls side, Grace Lathrop and Katie Kopec finished together at Sac Town in 5:18, marking the first time any Whitney girl has broken 5:20 since 2016 when Jordan Sienkiewicz went 5:13 in the post-season.
3200
Nico Lucas shaved more than a full minute off of his 3200m mark from last season. And Nick Reis cut nearly a minute off of his previous best. Luca Ruscica, Connor Jacoby, as well as a bunch of guys in the 10’s (breaking 11 min) … James Bowen, Aidan Redding, and Jacob Harbert … all improved on their previous best.
A very memorable event occurred at the Lincoln Dual Meet, where our top 3200m runner Austin Vasquez set a 10:10 pace for as many guys as could play along. Aidan Ransford, Riley Carroll, Byron Chadwick, Josh Tajiri, and freshman Cole Jamieson worked together in a solid pack to grind out 8 laps on pace, all crossing the line under 10:20 that night. A couple weeks later, Jason Finta and Byron bettered that, and for the first time, each broke 10 minutes at Placer. Quite a few other guys lowered their marks even more than from the Lincoln effort. Many saw Byron thrust his arms in the air as he crossed the finish line in victory, not so much because he won, but because he and Jason succeeded in their effort to break 10 minutes.
DMR
One early season goal for our top varsity runners was to see how many events and top runners we could qualify for Arcadia, which is a very elite meet down in SoCal. Placer was our only meet of the season that had a Distance Medley Relay, so our guys and girls teams each knew their team mark to hit for qualifying. The boys had to beat 10:50 and the girls needed 12:57.
The ladies were within a few seconds of their goal the whole way. Brooke Giorgi had arguably the toughest task, trying to hand off the baton in a pre-set pace of 4 minutes flat for the 1200m, which truthfully was out of her pace range this early in the season. But she hit 4:03, which immediately got us within 3 seconds on the first leg, much better than anticipated. Abby Gardner (400m) and Grace Lathrop (800m) each beat their splits and combined to gain 8 seconds, so when Katie Kopec got the baton to anchor the 1600, she started with a 5-second cushion. Katie gained a couple seconds, crossing in 12:50, beating the qualifying mark by 7 seconds. The girls just missed the school record of 12:49.
The guys DMR was equally dramatic. Ethan started off the 1200m with a pre-race plan to pace for 2:12 at the 800 mark, which he hit bang on. And with a green light at that point to see what he could do, he closed with a 60-second lap to suddenly put us 5 seconds ahead early on. Joey is an amazing 400m runner and after being sick all week, hammered to within a second of his PR. Brenden took the baton and hit sub-60 on his first lap of the 800, and followed that up with a 2nd lap also under 60. Austin was in the midst of a major head cold, coughing like crazy, but was paced to go 4:30, which is exactly what he did. Final time? 10:31. Not just qualifying for Arcadia, but hitting a mark that would earn them a spot in the Saturday Night Invitational portion of the meet, running as one of the top teams in the entire state of California. Oh, and they set a new school record, breaking the old mark of 10:38.
Given the controlled, pre-race pace limitations we set for early season races, and the fact that a couple of our runners were sick, who knows what kind of marks these DMR teams would have hit in Arcadia.
3200
And finally, on the note of the 3200 … we at Whitney have had the distinct honor of witnessing one of the best ever to specialize at this distance. Austin Vasquez selflessly offered to pace the 10:10 group at Lincoln, then offered his services as our miler in the record-setting DMR at Placer, and was patiently waiting for a chance to race a 3200. Meanwhile, as the public health issue took center stage and it was suddenly clear the season was being cut, Austin had one chance to post a legitimate mark in the 3200 at our hastily thrown-together time trial on our last day together. Austin made it clear he did not need to run the 1600 in order to have a fresh 3200, so he rushed home to get his spikes, then got help from some teammates to take turns rabbiting laps for Austin. A gutsy effort all by himself otherwise, and he hit 9:35, one of the top marks in the section. This is the event Austin went to state in last track season, a distance that is his specialty, and is one of the school records that he holds. We can only wonder what he would be able to hit with an uninterrupted season.
As this is being written, everything has been dramatically altered–not just our truncated track season, but every aspect of daily life. By many accounts, the last time our country faced these kinds of shutdowns to so many facets of American life was during World War II. This health crisis is obviously way bigger than track season. But we will forever wonder what times, places, PR’s and various achievements would have been earned and celebrated by the greatest distance squad around. Cheers to the Whitney Distance Team, Spring 2020–especially to the seniors.