In the first Albemarle Invitational since 2019, the varsity team took third moving up four places from their last showing. The weather at panorama farms was perfect with a cool overcast and a lot of PRs were broken. Only a handful of the team had competed at the 2019 edition of the meet and 2 girls had significant time drops from that race!
Maddie Gypson had a huge race to place 4th overall amongst some of the strongest runners in the state. Her time of 19:24 lowered her PR by 23 seconds and makes her one of the fastest sophomores in Albemarle XC History.
Junior Jenna Coleman placed 11th running just outside of 20 minutes to give Albemarle two runners in before every team except eventual champions Western Albemarle. Another huge performance which was a deciding factor in the overall team score was Hanna Guyton's 20:29 which was a 4 second PR from her previous 2018 best and significantly closed the gap between the top three runners of the team. The race was a long time coming for the junior who has been close but unable to beat her 2018 time for years and this breakthrough shows a lot of promise for the rest of her season.
Eva Weaver also came very close to an old PR running 21:19 for her second fastest time ever, her fastest since 2019, and a 39th place showing. Savannah Meriwether ran 22:11 for her fastest time since 2019 as well and continues to improve week by week. Lillian Peskova set a season's best of 22:33 and Alexis Alms was the final Albemarle Varsity runner placing 79th and also breaking 23 minutes with 22:55.
In the JV race the girls took 6th overall despite missing some runners who would compete in the freshman division later in the day. Bella Popovsky was the top runner for Albemarle with a strong 24:17 for 26th overall. Grace Kohler ran a 9 second season's best for 25:12. Sophia Rankin ran 26:36 in her first 5km race of the season and was followed in by Stella Klosek who ran a big PR of 1:08 to break 28 and 27 for the first time. Shelby Owed, in her first 5k of the season dropped a huge 1:45 from last season's PR to run 27:12.
Avani Abhyankar ran her fastest time since 2019 and was followed in by her training partner, Elise Guiffre who's 34:55 was also her fastest time since 2019.
In the freshmen division Emily Uthlaut had a breakout performance dropping 1:44 from her PR set earlier in the season to run 23:10 and place 7th overall. This time would have placed her 16th in the JV and made her Albemarle's top runner in that race as well. Brooke Blankenship ran a 40 second PR to break 27 minutes for the first time and Maddie Hephner ran 34:58 in her first 5k as a patriot.
This was the last regular season invitational for the whole team and a few girls will travel next weekend to race at the Running with the Wolves invite before all the girls will be back in action at the Jefferson District Championship meet.
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