Roy Griak Invitational

It was Friday afternoon on September 27th, 2013, we were on our way up to St Paul, Minneapolis for the Roy Griak Invitational, one of the biggest XC meets of the season.  It's one of the meets where to see where we are at as a team and how we can compete against the big teams in our WIAC Conference & rest of Division III.  Once we got off the bus, we got to run around the Les Bolstad course for an easy shake out, when we were doing our run I was thinking, I feel like I went to running heaven, it's an amazing course, there were some spots with tough rolling hills, but it's a good course.  After the run, got to load up carbs at Noodles & then went to the hotel, stayed at the Country Inn.  Had a team meeting, coach Antczak told us the plan & he said "We've been doing pretty well with workouts and staying healthy, it's time to show what we can do".  Next morning, race day, September 28th, 2013. We did our 7 minute shakeout before breakfast, then I had my pregame breakfast which is a couple of bagels and bananas.  Got to the bus and head to the course.  Once we got there, it was a lot of fans and runners a cross the country, it's amazing.  We started warming up around the course before our race & we had a game plan, basically stay in packs.  After doing our warmup & doing our drill/strides, we huddled up & said, "time to get out relaxed & aggressive, get out quick".  Time to show the rest of the teams what we can do.  Got to our start line, the gun went off, I was a little squeezed in the beginning of the race, but started to spread out during the race.  I kinda started losing the guys at the beginning when we were 400 meters into the race.  Then thought to myself, time to chase down some guys & keep fighting till the end.  Feeling good the first mile, second mile was feeling okay, once I got to the 5k, started to feel the pain from running the hills, thought myself, you trained for this, time to show what I can do.  I kept grinding & pushing through the hills, once I got to 6k, it's time to make a move & start passing a lot of people.  I was feeling the pain, but feeling good at the same time.  When I was close to the finish, I tried to kick as hard as I can.  I was able to finish on one of the toughest courses of my XC collegiate career & I'm happy with it.  My time was 28:56, not what I wanted, placed 126th, not what I wanted.  I knew after the race I have some things to work on & learned a lot from the race.  What I learned is you have to get out quicker early in the race & how bad do you want it.  We didn't place very well as a team, we were 5th overall behind Eau Claire, Oshkosh, Bates, & Wartburg, we knew we were better than those teams.  Hoping to get our guys back from injuries & get our minds back in the right place.  We now know that we have some work to do & get our confidences back, coach Antczak knows we are better than this, we just have to get our other guys like myself step up.  If we can do those things, we should still be able to hit the goals/expectations that we set back in August.