Jonny ran his first cross country meet for the Golden Flashes today at Silver Creek Metro Park which is the home of the Akron Zips. The weather was cool in the upper 50’s leading up to race time. Just before the girls race started there was thunder and lightning and the race was delayed 30 minutes. The wind really picked up and the rain started coming down harder with more thunder and lightning. We were told the race was cancelled. We met up with Jonny to drop off more provisions for his pantry in the dorm room and started heading home. We got about 20 minutes away and Jonny texted back saying the race was just delayed and they were planning on running. We turned around and headed back and parked the car and waited for the rain to stop. We were checking the live timing site and as we were looking at the site trying to get some information, they changed from girls preparing for the race to boys on deck. We got out and started walking towards the course and within a couple of minutes we heard a gun go off. We talked to some of the Akron volunteers and they decided instead of scrapping the entire evening they were going to run both the boys and girls in a 5K race instead of the boys running a 4 mile race. They started the boys and after they were on the course for 5 minutes they started the girls, so they had boys and girls on the course at the same time, but on different parts of the course.
Because of the change of events, Jonny didn’t get a good long warm up and they walked the course earlier as a 4 mile course. So Jonny wasn’t really sure exactly where he was in the race since the course changed on him. He looked nice and relaxed on the course and after the race he said it was more like a hard workout than an actual race. He didn’t kick until late, but finished very strong with a time of 16:22.4 and finished 34th out of 45 runners.
We were happy we got to see him run instead of them cancelling the entire race after driving 2 and a half hours to get to the meet.
The official results can be found here on the Finish Timing web site.
I took some video of the race.