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SPARTAN INVITATIONAL
SPARTAN INVITATIONAL
News & notes
Busy day: The Spartan Invitational featured 14 races with more than 250 participants finishing their respective competitions.
Home-field advantage: Boardman’s Mark Hadley already had his home-field mapped out and played it to his advantage. “I knew where everything was at so I knew where to push and where not to push,” Hadley said. Particularly, he tore it hard around the two-mile mark en route to the outstretched arms of his father, Scott, waiting for him at the finish line. Hadley led the Spartans to a 13th place team standing in Division I with his 5:09, fourth overall mark.
Fast Quaker: Salem’s Caela Lehman finished in 63rd for Division II girls. “I took 30 seconds off my PR,” she exclaimed. “All the hard work is finally paying off.” The Quaker girls were 13th in Division II.
Regret: Disappointment set in for some runners, too. McKinsie Klim of Poland wishes she could have the final 300 yards of her race back, even though she had an eighth place time of 19:42. “I’d like to have gone harder at the end, probably in the woods when I saw the finish chute,” Klim said. There is a tormenting hill that sits just strides away from the start line. Klim says it could have been a partial perpetrator. “You get pumped up running fast up it, then it catches up with you and you’re tired at the end,” Klim said. The Bulldogs turned in a 249-point team point performance, good enough for sixth place.
Close finish: The Division III boys race came down to a near photo-finish with South Range’s Ryan Roush falling in second. “We do feet exercises that help our strides and I think my foot may have beat him,” said Roush, referring to Berkshire’s Matt Pelletier who had stuck his chest out further, though, giving him a 15:52 Division III victory. “It was my first loss of the year,” Roush said.