Teams Hard Work Paying Off

The Irvington High School Cross Country team is well into its season for this year, led by their new coach David Thomson. The captains for this year include Juan Coronado-Ramos and Connor Delang on the boys’ side and Renee Tran and katie Delang on the girls’ side. According to Thomson, the team is off to a great year since the runners are working hard while having fun doing it. Enjoying this is quite the task, considering their workout schedule. Mondays and Thurdays are usually “hard days” where the team runs a bit slower (but probably faster than you can) for anywhere between six and nine miles. Tuesdays are usually pre meet days, while Wednesdays are the dual meets. Of course all of these are subject to change, like what happened last week, when there was no scheduled race. In the races, both the male and female JV teams run a two mile race course, while Varsity runs three.

This season is seeing a couple of breakout runners, including freshman Victoria Ramos, who received 3rd place at the Logan dual meet two weeks ago, completing the varsity 5k race in a time of 22:31. At the Crystal Springs invitational race on the 10th of October, the top male runner from our team was junior Connor Delang, who ran a 17:16 three mile race. Although these are only a couple of the highlights of this season, all the runners are excelling, partly because of the new methods of training coach Thomson has implemented.

“The workout style is quite a bit different from what the runners are used to from previous years,” says Thomson, who is stressing dynamic stretches and intensive interval workouts. Additionally, as many track runners remember from last season, David Thomson is also infamous for his exhaustive abdomen training. Core workouts are great for distance runners since the abs are crucial to the complete runner.

Hopefully all this hard work pays off for the team at the Mt. Sac invitational, a varsity race on the last weekend of October. Also, look forward to the November 12th MVAL championships, the final scheduled race for the 2009 cross country season.