The Illinois Cross Country Club was back in action last week and put together some fast times at Augustana’s Brisman-Lundeen Invite. The race teed off at Rock Island’s Saukie Golf Course and the flat course gave way to some fast times for the club. The men placed eighth of 39 teams and the women placed ninth of 35.
There were a lot of fast performances, but the biggest head-turner of the day was Mr. David Oskar Choi. David was the fourth runner for the Illini with a blazing time of 26 minutes and 29 seconds. Head coach Steve Krauklis said he finally ran the way he should and wow! While most know David as the team’s title-holder for “Most Awesomely Awkward Facebook Pictures,” he showed he really has some serious wheels on Friday. The performance was a huge 1 minute and 41 second PR and one of David’s highest-ever finishes with the team
Before the race, Steve said to look out for Jared and Cobert, and I had noticed the freshman LZ-Boys, Brian Griffin and Austin “Chief” Kuehr, had strung together some nice workouts. The Lake Zurich crew delivered on Friday. Jared had his best race of the season so far as the team’s third runner, running his second fastest 8K ever with a 26:27. Cobert wasn’t far behind in his strongest race of the young season, clocking a 26:40.
The freshman, B-Griff and Chief, also had breakthroughs. Brian said he wanted to break 30 at Augustana; he went and broke 29 while he was at it, running a 28:56, a 2:55 improvement from EIU. Chief dipped under 29 minutes with a 28:56, a huge 3:36 improvement.
Greg Netols was the Illini men’s top finisher and perhaps more significantly, earned a Brismann-Lundeen Top 35 t-shirt with his 28th place finish. Evan White was a few places behind him, tantalizingly close to a t-shirt in 40th place. Rounding out the top seven were Jared, David, freshman phenom Nick Bushelle, Cobert, and another freshman phenom, Michael Frintner (about 20 places behind Nick, “his rock”).
Every member of my car had a breakthrough performance and ran much, much faster than EIU. The Might Quinn Todzo, the self-proclaimed “Chancellor,” dropped 3:09 from his EIU time in his old racing flats to hit 28:41. Quinn also displayed some bilingual prowess at Maria’s after the race, dropping phrases like “sí” and “gracias.” Ziggy “Stardust” Zamora dropped 3:09, Jacob Wilson dropped 4:04, and Alex Erwin dropped a whopping 5 minutes and 25 seconds! I don’t think any other cars showed that level of improvement!
Also, shout-outs are due to David Lundline, Steven Orta, Michael Schaible, Ken Sprague and Ilyas Taraki for making their IXC debuts at Augustana.
For the women, it was the first 6K of the year, which will be the standard distance come the post-season. Emma Grimes led the way with a t-shirt-clinching 18th place performance. She was followed by the captain, Megan Mocogni, and freshman star Erin McKee. While Erin had a good day on the course, her most valuable contribution to the team may have been her parents, who came to cheer on the Illini and baked 52 (!) oatmeal chocolate chip muffins for the team. Thank you to the McKee’s!
After track social coordinator-elect Emma Burkhardt finished in the four spot for the women, Lexy Rudofski completed the scoring 5 for Illinois. It was her second race for the club, and second time scoring points. Thea Cudnowski and Hannah Smith rounded out the top seven.
The two women who made their debut at EIU, Anna Piazza and Angela Wu, saw big time improvement. EIU was a 5K and Augustana was a 6K, so comparisons are harder, but Anna averaged 7:23 pace at EIU and dropped that to 7:07 in a longer race. Angela’s average mile pace jumped all the way from 8:48 to 7:20!
Overall, there was improvement across the board for the club. After terrible conditions at EIU for the start of the season, the Illini took advantage of a fast course and started to reap the benefits of their first few weeks of training. The club will split-squad the next two weekends to two difficult courses. Some runners are heading downstate to SIU-Edwardsville’s John Flamer Invite, and some runners will travel to UW-Parkside’s Lucian Rosa Invite.
Also, a friendly reminder to give our own Joe Zeller, @ZanyZeller a follow on Twitter!
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