Let's put it this way

Most of the state's heavy cross country hitters were in Anchorage for the Bartlett Invite, and cross-town Lathrop won the whole thing! Service High School has dominated the past several years. This year it's wide open, and the championship may very well be decided by someone's fifth man.

The other high schools had their first 5K of the season out at the Chena River flood control project outside of North Pole. It's a nice flat course which is a good confidence booster and opportunity to break last year's PRs.

West Valley had a very solid day, with the boys and girls taking easy victories. The paper did produce an article, but the quotations from winner Kuba Grzeda were somewhat lost in translation.

What Kuba was saying is that he usually goes out fast and hangs on (sometimes dying at the end of the race), and that's how he's run his best times so far. But this time he tried going out a little easier (the top three were actually having a bit of a conversation through the first mile), which they covered in 5:24. Then they got to business, and ran 5:20 for mile two. The boys got real serious for the final mile with Grzeda going about 4:40 (school record 15:52), Andre Ionashku of Delta running about 4:48 (15:59), and West Valley's third place finisher Peter Noon doing 4:53 to finish in 16:04, a personal best by 48 seconds.

Karl Kowalski photo


Both my boys PR'd with Mikko running 17:17 and Tristan was 18:56 in his freshman 5K debut. Meanwhile, FAST's Erich Hoefler knocked off 30 sec from his PR and was 17:07 in the open race.