Boy's Cross Country: Knights Overcome Heat in Hagerstown

By Ben Spector
Winning After MidKnight

                         

HAGERSTOWN-To say the conditions at the Rebel Invitational at South Hagerstown High School were unbearable would probably be an understatement. All the teams including the Middletown High School Boy’s Cross Country team were in a battle not only with the course and the other runners but also with the weather that was bearing down on them.

Still Middletown would manage to battle as a team throughout the race as the Knights picked up their best finish in a while as they took third place out of fifteen teams in the meet, with Middletown just finishing thirty points out of first place.

The Boy’s would run in the final Varsity race of the meet at 9:40 and for much of the time before the race was about to start it didn’t seem like the heat would be a huge issue as a low layer of cloud cover hung over the sky providing some much needed shade and cloud cover to keep the runners at least somewhat cool.

That cloud cover would hang around until about five minutes before the race began and then give way just as they boy’s were getting ready to run leaving only sunshine to blast the course. Once, that sunshine came out it got really warm really quickly and by the time the opening gun had sounded the temperature was unbearable, even for the spectators let alone the runners.

Any cross country race would be tough to run in the heat but on the South Hagerstown course, which is extremely hilly and open, the heat from the Sun blasted the runners adding to the exhaustion that they were already going to feel.

For some runners on Middletown, the heat didn’t seem to have an effect while for some it did. Based on the conditions, even if it did affect the competitors no one would complain about as just competing a race with a decent time in the mid-morning heat was hard fought.

Leading the pack for Middletown, would be the dynamic duo of juniors Brennan Straits and Riley McDermott as they would do what they have tried to do in all races, stay together as a pair at the front of the pack and pace each other as a result of being up front together.

Assuredly, the heat did effect McDermott and Straits in person but from a spectator’s view it didn’t seem as either of them were running any differently from before as there were no signs of a struggle with the weather besides the sweat drench singlets adorned with the Middletown “M”.

Still McDermott and Straits seemed to be in prime form as the duo would finish back-to-back again this time with the pair finishing in sixth and seventh place respectively as the two ended up just slightly on opposite sides of the 17:43 mark.

That would give Middletown a good baseline for a high team finish and as the race wore on it became more and more obvious that the Knights would do just that as for much of the race they would have two of their other runners inside the top 30 as well.

But, for some of those runners the heat would have an effect on them as for junior Duncan Taylor, sophomore Trey Davvorn and freshman David Rapp they all appeared to be out of breath as they came into the final stretches of the race.

It still was a successful result for the three Middletown runners as they would all stay in the upper half of the pack with their finishes meaning that Middletown was in excellent shape to finish high up in the team totals, something that they would do with ease.

Taylor would come in 20^th pace with an even time of 18:51 while Davvorn would cross in 33^rd place with a 19:17.40 and David Rapp who came in 41^st place coming in at 19:37.60.

It was a trademark performance for the Knights as Middletown cobbled together another result that proved just how legit the team is as a whole and how they will be a force to be reckoned with when it comes to regionals.

Middletown’s third place finish was just eleven shy of Greencastle-Antrim High School who came in second place and 30 shy of Albert Einstein High School, who first place.

After the race was all done and the team gathered back at the team camp, under a shady breezeway on the outskirts of a campus and looking at the runners who had just finished it was obvious that most of the runners had pushed themselves to the limit in that heat as bags of ice sat on most runners legs, a slow attempt to cool all the runners down.

At the end of the day, since all players ended up being fine it was all worth it for the Knights as they continued to be “forged by the fire,” even if Mother Nature did take the fire part a little too literally.