After a cool, foggy and drizzly start, the clouds broke up and we had a glorious sunny morning for our cross country meet at the New Market Battlefield.  The New Market course is quite the challenge, as the hills are not steep, but the inclines are long and numerous.  No personal or season bests were gotten on Saturday, but all 7 runners who had run here before in 2021 bettered their time.

Our varsity girls started first with Rose Waldron beating her previous time at New Market by over two minutes.  Rose finished 15th in the small school division.  Monica Hartung also beat her prior time at New Market by over a minute, while Penny Kramer won the Kramer sister competition.

The varsity boys ran in a pretty tight pack, with our first five runners crossing the finish line within a span of only 41 seconds!   Michael Brand led the way with an 8th place finish in the small school division, while Patrick Gross, Daniel Jackson, Peter Konstanty and Jerome Kramer finished in quick succession in places 15 through 18.  That meant that our fifth scoring runner came in before most teams had their third runner in!  When the final results were calculated, our depth brought us a first place in the small school division by 4 points!  Max Wilson and Kieran Kelly also placed as our sixth and seventh runners.  Joe Dwane finally overcame his injury bug and ran his first race of the season, running under his time from 2021 at this course, while Michael Brox dropped two and a half minutes off from his 2021 New Market time!  John Karcher also came back from injury to be our tenth varsity runner for this race, but has to watch out for the competition for that spot from the JV runners...

Speaking of JV runners, Patrick Kay placed 4th in the JV boys race, small school division, with a time of 22:23, which would have put him as our 8th varsity runner.  He has displaced John in the top ten, as competition for the last couple of spots on the state team is really heating up!  Also in the running, no pun intended, is Christian Ghering, who placed 7th in the JV race, 30 seconds behind Patrick and 15 seconds ahead of John Karcher's time in the varsity race.  Gabriel Dwane placed 12th and Peter Hartung 14th in the JV race, while Luke Griffin looked strong and relaxed as he ran his first race of the season.  JV runners Joey Lynch, Andrew Ghering, Ben Ellis, Cora Kramer and Colette Kramer also conquered the New Market course, which most runners agreed was the toughest so far this year. 

Here are the results:

And here is the breakdown on how we defeated the second place team from Fort Defiance HS:

20:52.9

Link to Results: https://va.milesplit.com/meets/561584-25th-annual-generals-xc-invitational-2023