Prediction Contest

As you may or may not have heard, this past weekend, I competed in a snow covered Conference Championship meet about 2 hours from my dorm. This, naturally means two things. 1st, I ran a very slow time even though I think I finished 17 places higher than the previous year (about a 20% increase), went painfully numb in various place I care not to discuss publicly, and finished wet and cold and miserable. And no that's not what she said.

But the 2nd fact was much more painful/depressing/upsetting to me. I was away from a computer for two days and I failed to update my loyal blog followers (appearently I'm to 3 now which is very exciting) on the district championships results that had been coming in from the weekend.

Well folks, I'm back and hopefully will not be facing the piles of school work I faced this past week, which means I can dedicate myself to covering the upcoming state championships like nobody's business.

First though, while I have everyone's attention, I want to say a few things about the district one championships from this past weekend. First off major props to Magaha, he looks unbeatable after that performance ... but I suppose we will get to that later in the week. Also huge congrats to Ned Willig and Great Valley. They really redeemed themselves from a rough patch earlier in the season and look like a legit top 5 contender at the state championships. Also quick shout out to my summer training partner Francis Ferrruzzi, great race kid.

Finally, just wanted to give a hearty congrats to a couple guys who I have watched grow up in the past few years, training hard, but just missing states this past Friday, Jon Hartsough and Sam Brooks. You guys both had fantastic seasons and should be proud of the strides you've made over the past years, even if it didn't quite work out as you might have hoped, keep your heads up.

But this post is not about shout outs or pretending like I'm friends with a bunch of good runners or kissing up to people and name dropping or anything like that, as much as I would like to keep bringing up people like my possible future training partner from CR North who ran a nice 16:44 this Friday, but serious I'm done. Moving on.

At some point later this week I will be posting my state predictions including: The top 5-10 teams (not exactly sure how deep I can go here, definitely can go through 6 or so, after that I'm fuzzy), my top 50 AAA boys (going to be a bit of a tough one here with a lot of names, but I'll give it a shot) and my top 25 AA boys (again this will probably look very rough, especially at the end, but just work with me). Hopefully each of these will come with some in depth analysis and be up by around Wednesday this week so people can check them out. Keep your fingers crossed.

Now, some of you are probably looking up at the title of this post and wondering when the heck is this kid going to stop bragging that he is a boss because he ran through snow and knows Francis Ferruzzi and tell us what the heck this Prediction Contest is. Well, this is the part of the post where your questions are answered.

For this upcoming state meet I challenge you all out there to correctly name more of the 25 state medalists in either AA or AAA boys. Order does not matter, I'm only looking for names. You can list up to 25 names, and as little as one name if you really want to (although I am fairly confident you will not beat with just one name, not to sound like the dude, but I mean my roommate from Vermont can probably get 10-12 just from living with me and listening to me blabber all day).

All you have to do is post a list of your 25 state medalists (chose just AA or just AAA for each entry. You can enter once for each, but keep the lists seperate because they will be scored seperately). Like I said all I need are the 25 names and your name. If you get the guy who finished 25th it is the same value as getting the guy who finished 1st.

Lists can be posted either as a comment on the blog, as a facebook message to me, as a post on penntrack as long as you address the post to me and post up a link to the blog (yay advertising), as a penntrack message to me, or as a text message to me.

Hopefully we can have some fun with this and in a week hopefully I won't be crying that all of my readers know the state better than I do. Game on gentlemen.

-train