Alumni Race

The first hard effort of the fall semester was the XC running team's Run For Ryan/Alumni Race held last Saturday. We've been invited to this event for many years now, and it really just boils down to a simple race setting: The current XC team, the current Nordic team, and the alums of both.

This year the men's team (clearly standing out in the crowd by being the only group of 10+ who went shirtless) raced mostly as a large pack, with Sophomore Austin Meng taking top honors of the ski crowd (not counting Alum and 2002 Olympic Biathlete Lawton Redman, 3rd overall) and probably surprising a few XC runners. Not far behind him was first-year Matt Dier and junior Eric Lustgarten, who recently returned from a summer in Sun Valley, ID.
"I didn't even feel the effort" said Meng excitedly afterward, fresh from Truckee, CA. "That's what you get from altitude."

Maybe, but a glance at the training logs from Eric or Meng, who spent their summers at high elevation, shows more than just thin-air oxygen consumption. The two both put in the hours and workouts to be top performers, and the training is already paying off. The rest of the men's team was not far behind, mostly running together and pushing each other as a group. The surprise of the day was when Coach Etown put in a huge surge at mile 2 to pass the guys team and stay ahead of them, crossing the line as 4th SLUSKIer. Yours truly took a more typical coach-esque approach, pretty much doggin' it near the back of the pack and watching the whole scene unfold.

Eric finishing off the Alumni Race Saturday

The girls race was equally impressive, though I didn't get to see as much of it for obvious reasons. The SLUSKI women even managed to make a pretty good dent in the women's XC team, giving a lot of them a run for their money. First-year Cassidy Cichowicz finished in 5th overall, just 2 seconds ahead of Sophomore Kate Mulcahy.

Overall Cassidy and Meng combined for a Cali-sweep of the ski teamers, doing the West coast proud. The race was sunny and hot, but things changed shortly after. As first-year Evan Martell, a Vermonter->Sun Valley transplant, said in the driving rain yesterday, "been a while, guess I'm not ready for this East Coast stuff just yet".