The New Hampshire Meet of Champions is this afternoon
Expect a boys' meet record, but not a course record, and not by the nationally ranked kid
The New Hampshire Meet of Champions is today. Its two races each include eighteen teams from last week’s divisional state-championship meets (the top seven from Division I, the top six from D-II, and the top five from D-III) along with a smattering of individuals (anyone who finished in the top 30 of the D-I races, the top 25 of the D-II races, or the top 20 of the D-III races qualified for today’s meet).
In the 1980s, when I ran in the MoC twice, only twelve teams qualified from the divisional meets, but I believe that close to the same number of individuals advanced. The event therefore featured a significantly higher proportion of individual runners than it does now. But as was true thirty-five years ago, the top six boys’ and girls’ teams at the MoC, along with any individuals in the top 25, will qualify for the New England Championships in Rhode Island next week.
The girls’ race is at 2:30 p.m. EDT and the boys start at 3:20 p.m. Live results will be available here, although if you have either reasonably strong willpower or insufficient interest in these races, you can wait for the videos to be posted here (probably by tomorrow morning).
The results from last week’s six divisional state meets on their face suggest that D-II Coe-Brown will dominate the boys’ race, with D-II Souhegan and D-I Pinkerton likely to battle for second and as many as six D-I teams vying for the other three New Englands berths. Barring a major surprise, the girls’ champion will be either D-II Hanover, D-I Pinkerton, or D-I Bedford, with D-II Oyster River, D-I Winnacunnet, and another D-I team likely to reach the New Englands on November 12.
Owing to construction, the meet is at Alvirne High School instead of its usual location at Mine Falls Park in Nashua. If Mine Falls is about 3 percent faster than Derryfield Park, the course at Alvirne, used for the Battle of the Border in recent years, seems even faster, I daresay suspiciously fast. A 16:40 at Derryfield Park (site of the divisional state meets) is probably just under 16:00 at Mine Falls and under 15:50 at Alvirne.
Two years ago, Coe-Brown’s Aidan Cox, then a sophomore, ran 14:58 at win the MoC and set a New Hampshire 5K cross-country record, and therefore an event and course record. Cox ran 14:32 at the Battle of the Border last month (results) to revise his state-record time, but he’s been up and down this fall with drivetrain problems secondary, it appears, to a major growth spurt. At last week’s D-II Championships. Cox fell apart mid-race after striding through the mile in 4:50 and finished a distant second to Lebanon’s Birhanu Harriman.
The last time this happened, Cox’s coach (also his dad) held him out of the next race as a precaution. Given the stakes, the fact that Cox is looking to peak at the Garmin RunningLane Championships next month, and the overall strength of the Coe-Brown boys, I’m guessing Cox will sit today. The team can win the race without him, with only Pinkerton remotely poised to challenge a Coe-Brown team consisting of its usual number-two through number-six runners, and the MoC really isn’t that important to most schools as no official team titles are awarded. This may be moot, because Cox may run after all, but unfortunately, I don’t think New Hampshire fans will get to see him in action this week. There’s a small chance he’ll be entered as asked to hold back, but that would just torture him and would make more sense if a state title were in the balance.
If Cox sits out, that leaves Patrick Gandini of Gilford and Harriman to vie for the individual title. Harriman sat on Gandini and outkicked him by one second at the Bobcat Invitational in September, while Gandini prevailed over Harriman by 22 seconds at the Manchester Invitational. Last week, Harriman easily won his race in Manchester in 15:31, while Gandini prevailed in his even more easily in 15:28.
Neither kid has a habit of obligatory frontrunning. If it’s no warmer than the 70 degrees it’s expected to reach in Hudson, N.H. today and the two of them hit the mile in 4:45, I think both can break 14:50, meaning one of them will end the day with a new MoC event record. But Cox’s 14:32 from October seems safe.
The Concord boys limped into this one. Whether they qualify for the New Englands today will depend on whether they hang back in the first mile, as Gandini and Harriman will suck a solid twenty kids under 5:00 for the mile and Concord has no real up-front horses. Last week, their top five reached the mile in 5:17-5:23 at Derryfield, but no Tide runner broke 17:00. If they pull the same shit again today, they’ll wind up eighth or ninth. In fact, the fifth and sixth boys’ teams to reach the New Englands will be the ones whose runners dawdle together through the mile.
The individual favorite in the girls’ race is Susanna Zahn of D-II Bow, who could run 17:45 today if she doesn’t go through the mile in 5:35. But she’ll probably go through the mile in 5:35, and will probably run very close to 18:00, finishing 10 or 15 seconds in front of Brianna Malone of D-III Portsmouth Christian. Malone is very competitive and when runners ahead of her begin to fade, she almost visibly seems to start clawing her way toward the lead, at least in track races.
At the start of the season, I would have picked the Concord girls to reach the New Englands with relative ease this fall. I’m not sure what happened, but although they managed to back into the MoC much like the Concord boys did, they’ll probably be done after today.
The results from last week explicitly listed competing schools that fielded incomplete teams, rather than just listing any individuals from these schools in the individual race results. Here are the stats on that:
In D-I, 19 of the 20 boys’ schools represented and 18 of the 20 girls’ schools were able to field complete teams. In D-II, these numbers were 19 out of 19 (B) and 14 out of 19 (G), and in D-III, they were 24 of 32 (B) and 15 of 30 (G). I was shocked to see that none of the three Manchester public high schools (Central, Memorial, and West) managed to field a complete boys’ or girls’ cross-country team this fall. That city has 112,000 people. Is there some kind of compact to keep youngsters from taking up running in the Queen City?
I seem to be growing bored with this whole project. I don’t know if this stems mostly from knowing I’ll be “earning a living” by means other than writing from now on, or whether I was eventually going to get sick regardless of hunting for words, researching cross-country data, my own typos, and the fact that I now hate paying attention to almost anything human beings do in groups. Nothing about either my life or the world in general is going to improve going forward, and if I do in fact lose all desire to shit out a bunch of words for a few hundred to a few thousand people, I can refund paying subs’ money with one click and just be done with this shit.
If so, I’ll leave what’s already posted live, but it wouldn’t surprise me if “they” managed to take down Substack within a year, given the level of honesty here by high-profile reporters such as Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald. I would be better off just reading holdable books and disconnecting from the Internet when not using it to “earn a living,” and I’m not the only one who feels this way. As a sport, running is shit, and so are most of the people, companies, and entities involved in it with recognizable names.
I’m sufficiently cynical at this stage about everything that matters to be astonished by the sight of pregnant people, as I cannot imagine the line of reasoning that goes into deciding that installing a new human consciousness in this world is a remotely good idea even for the relatively well-off. But that’s a completely different concern, even if it bleeds into everything I write or think about.