Hosting their first home cross country meet of the year, the Lightning put on a show. The girls team took fourth overall and the boys took fifth, with 18 total runners setting personal record times at the invitational. Lauren Cleary, who set a season PR of 23:57 shared, “[Today] was really good. I think everyone’s really happy with their times and it will be exciting to see how the team does overall compared to the others.”
AJ Konley added after PRing in his race by one minute and 19 seconds, “We all did really well. I’ve been hearing a lot of PRs, so we’re doing pretty good. We just need to keep up the great work on our workouts and recovery runs.”
Not only had the teams been working hard at school practices during the week, but they had put in extra effort outside of it to better their times and endurance. Konley continued, explaining about the team’s trip to a different course that week, “I think running Black Loop at Lapham [Peak] helped a lot. The difficult terrain helped build up my endurance a lot more.”
Running Black Loop certainly helped the athletes and was a fun and challenging way to change up the typical routine outside of regular practices at LCL, but another aid to the team was being able to run at home, on familiar grounds.
Cleary explained, “This week during practice we got to pre-run it, so we know all the loops and tangent angles.” Konley added on, “We ran the course a couple days ago, so we knew what to expect and where the difficult parts of the race were.”
Thanks to a season of hard work and hosting their own invitational for the first time of the season, the Lightning cross country team was able to find much success yet again.
Emily Johnson, who set a season personal best time this past weekend, smiled and said, “I think we’re going to have a lot of PRs this race.”