Today was the Founders League Championships hosted by Loomis. Conditions throughout the afternoon shifted from perfect conditions for the JV race to quite chilly for the Boys’ Varsity race. Both of our squads took fourth out of the 9 teams. Each finished behind Loomis, Hotchkiss, and Choate—teams that beat us in the regular season. As has been true all season long, we were led by Oliver Dreyfuss. His time of 17:46 placed him 12th overall. Just 3 seconds behind him was Ali Griswold who took 16th. That 3-second gap was the closest anyone else on our team has been to Oliver. Rory McNamara finished in 18 minutes flat to take 21st overall. Co-captain Jude Celebi came across in 18:21. Finishing our team scoring was Yura Stasiuk in 18:34. With this, we had placed our 5 scoring runners in the top 30 overall. Huck Griswold (18:36) and co-captain Will Roberts (19:00) finished off our varsity results. As a team, we scored 106 points, which placed us 25 points behind Choate. Despite this placing, our results were truly fantastic. All 7 varsity runners set PRs for their 5k times. We raced on this course 4 weeks ago. At that point, 4 of our boys finished in under 19 minutes. Today, all 7 finished in 19 minutes or faster! A month ago, no one ran in under 18 minutes. Today 3 ran in 18 or less. Of all the varsity boys teams, we had the tightest span of our top 5 runners. There was only a 48 second gap between our top runner—Oliver—and our 5th runner—Yura. We have been focusing on running together and trying to be a pack, and today showed our prowess at putting that strategy into practice. The JV squad scored 73 points as we placed 3 runners in the top 15. Tate Celebi led the way with a 19:15 for 6th overall. Nate Dexter was not far behind in 19:34 for 11th place. Joseph Wang took 13th place in 19:49. Serafym Rybachkivskyi broke the 20-minute mark with a 19:59. Four weeks ago, no JV runner finished in under 20 minutes. Today we had 4! Jin Min’s time of 20:23 meant we had all 5 of our scoring runners finish in the top 25 of the race. Rounding out the official JV racers were Trevor Stellmach with a 20:32 and Rafe Van Wegenen with 20:41. A month ago, only 1 JV runner broke the 21-minute mark, while today, all 7 did! Each of these 7 also set season bests for their 5K times. Other finishers for us were Ed Liu (22:22), Ayden Cinel (22:38), Jed Spencer (22:51), Khai Shulman (23:06), Tonchok Dhanasarnsilp (23:29) and Jonah Mehler (24:50). Five of these boys set PRs, and Tonchok shaved off over a full minute from his previous best.