Runner SMASHES and BLOODIES FACE in fall; says "We get through this stuff," then CRUSHES previous best cross-country performance--and disbelieves INCREDIBLE result
A shout-out from Colorado to Hayden's homeboy Craig
After a nice race on his home course to open his season on September 1, my nephew Hayden (high-school version; collegiate version) did this to himself last Sunday:
After Hayden’s season-opening 16:27 5K, I thought that he might be capable of breaking 27:00 in his next race, an 8K. But I figured on a time closer to 27:15 (not accounting for either any damage or any invigorating effects from his tumble, which resulted or soon will result in a new crown on an obvious incisor). He's definitely more of a miler than a true distance guy, so even accounting for any super-recent improvement in fitness—and by his own reckoning, he didn't pace himself well two weeks ago—sub-5:26-per-mile pace was looking like a sufficiently rosy mark for him to sniff (pardon the rude deflowering of metaphorical prose).
That next race was yesterday. Seven days after a gravity-assisted roughhousing of his face precisely down the midline, Hayden ran so fast at the U.-Mass. Dartmouth Invitational that he thought a course he’d already raced on twice was short; this illusion was fostered by his consistently erratic GPS watch, which told him the route was 4.80 miles (8K is 4.97 miles).
Hayden’s freshman- and sophomore-year times on this course were 31:12 and 30:54 (he was about to retire from the 2022 season with anemia at this point last year). Beyond that violent forward leap in raw output, the U.-Mass. Dartmouth Invitational varsity race had 306 starters, so 80th place was outstanding. And since his time was faster than all but 16 of the 163 runners who started the junior-varsity race, Hayden was 96th-fastest of the 469 men who lined up on the day (not counting any who may have sneaked into one of the women's races).
The superlatives keep tumbling like giddy college boys down the slopes of Mount Kearsarge and overly detailed similes: Hayden was only 16 seconds behind the runner who beat him for the win two weekends ago by 21 seconds in much shorter race. He therefore closed the gap on this punk from about 7 seconds a mile to about 3, which is as useful a metric as any because Hayden and that runner will be vying for the individual conference championship in six weeks. And it was actually a decent achievement for his team—consisting of Hayden and five other guys—to place 28th out of 39 schools, given that most of the top schools were D-I and D-II teams (Colby-Sawyer is very much a D-III sports school).
St. Joseph's of Maine (no relation to Tom's of Maine) was 24th with an average time of 29:01 vs. for 29:14 for Colby-Sawyer, so the team race at the GNAC Championships on October 29 will be a memorable and bloody fight (but probably less gruesome to watch the same kids attempting a hilly Sunday long run). Before that, Hayden will race at the Keene State Invitational on Sept. 30 and at the Suffolk University Invitational in Boston on October 14, so he has two weeks between races from here on out.
That pattern will continue to apply if Hayden decides to race at the D-III Regional Championships on November 11 in Franklin Park in Boston, which he’ll have seen at the Suffolk Invite. Every New England cross-country runner eventually finds himself regularly tumbling into that venue if he’s been woven into the local magic of running, and this young man certainly has.
(Acknowledgements are owed to The Daily Mail and The New York Post, both of which contributed to the breathless headline style of this article.)