With the bar officially set at the prior week’s Wisner-Pilger Invite, coach Dan Fuhs is already seeing lessons learned from that meet and used well.
The transition to Friday’s Norfolk Catholic Invite did not show its true improvements for all of his runners through the time sheets but in how they ran, and with the Skyview Lake course providing more inspired racing than that of the Wisner course the week before, Fuhs said he saw the kids’ brains working as much as their legs.
“So they’re just running much smarter races,” he said. “You know, last week, we had a kid in first place after the first 800 meters, and they were not a first-place runner, but they were much smarter.”
Smarts were the name of the game on a course with several elevation changes. Following the right runners, pacing well and attacking through a challenging portion of the course made each Madison competitor work harder though more efficiently.
And Fuhs said he saw that fight in them up through the end.
“We did a great job today of every one of our runners passed somebody on the final stretch,” he said. “We talked about that a lot at practice, how you just can’t have anything left in the tank at the end. Everybody’s tired, and so you love to see that.”
Madison’s boys team was led again by Alex Carney, the senior rounding out the top 40 of the field with a time of 20:44.84.
Fransisco Juan Lucas came within just a few seconds of his time from a week ago, and also cracked the top 50, finishing at 21:51.91. Jonny Hinkel took 55th at 22:22.36.
Cesar Ramirez, Madison’s fourth runner, posted a big improvement of 24:18.21 to come down in time by around 40 seconds. Fuhs said there’s even
