Our newest blogger is Will Janakis formerly of Marshwood and presently a junior at Thomas College. Janakis fnished 15th in the North Atlantic conference championship last year running 29:02. Follow Will in his junior xc season for Thomas College.
The third week of the season has now come and gone with some ups and downs. The week started with a Monday morning workout in the rain. We were doing a minute on hard followed by 30 seconds easy, down Webb road and back (ended up being 18 minutes on hard). The first half of the workout I was dying; since senior year of high school, I’ve always had some sort of fall allergy. I have no idea what it is, but come mid-September to October, I’m always super congested. Halfway through the run, I stopped and was finally able to hack out half a lung and run a lot better the second half. It’s hard to say the pace—the road’s pretty hilly. Some miles were at 6-minute pace; some were below 5-minute pace. Tuesday I ran just under 8 miles over at Colby on their course. Then, Wednesday we headed over to Quarry Road on our course! I ran 8 miles there, including eight 200-meter hill sprints. There’s a big ski hill there that I refer to as “Devil’s chair” (because there’s a rock cliff called that in the woods nearby, so I call the whole hillside that). The hill’s cool because it has a lot of different slopes with different degrees of toughness to run up, so I did my eight reps on three different trails to mix it up. My Thursday was pretty boring: just 6.5 miles on the road, followed by six strides. Friday we went to my coach’s camp on Messalonskee Lake. We just about always do pre-meet there; we run an easy four, then we go for a dip in the water, and she makes us dinner. My legs were feeling a bit sore, so Dylan and I went and sat in a freezing cold stream nearby for ten minutes in lieu of an ice bath.
Come Saturday morning, I woke up feeling terrible. I didn’t get a ton of sleep, I felt congested, my legs hurt, my arms were tired, and I didn’t want to leave my bed. But cross country’s a team sport, and you need to pull it together for the other guys on the line with you. The course was Saxl Park in Bangor. It’s the only course we’re running this year that I haven’t already raced; therefore, I was intrigued to see what it would be like. I really liked the course; it was a lot of trails that cut through a giant field with a couple decent hills. What I didn’t like is the mud! Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy running through a mud puddle as much as the next guy, but mud puddles don’t like me. I’m a heavy lander which doesn’t fair well on soft land. The race went how I expected: the USM guys kind of did their own thing while everyone tried to outrun them. I was doing fairly well until 3.5 miles in—my mouth went dry, my throat started to close up, and I was on cruise control till the finish. I ran 31:26 which isn’t the time you dream of running, but my fastest opener before this was a 31:52 … and that was on a mud-free course! The team did really well too. We were third which is pretty good considering only 2 of our top 5 had ever raced 5 miles before!
This coming Saturday at 3:30 we will be hosting our first ever home meet over at Quarry Road. I invite anyone in the area that loves D3 cross country to come check it out! Our course is going to be awesome. Trust me, I know—I made it!!