Hey flrunners! Hope you all are having a great week of racing and training. Thursday, my team competed in St. Petersburg City Championships. This meet has always been one of my favorites. I've lived in St. Pete my whole life and I know a lot of the runners in the city. I love being able to cheer for a lot of friends at various schools.
This week was Homecoming week at Shorecrest and Thursday was also a day full of activites and no classes. Teammates and I played crab soccer, and powder puff football during the day. 
Throughout the day, my teammates and I made sure to drink a lot of water because we knew it would be close to 90 degrees out when we ran. We risked getting in trouble by sneaking water bottles into the gym and theatre (which is forbidden at our school).
We arrived at the meet with an hour until race time and we were feeling pumped up from our day of activities. Also, we had learned that our JV girls not only won, but they scored 16 points, coming in 1 (Lily Schneider) ,2,3,4, and 6. This really made us excited to run! My team and I warmed up as a team and did our best to focus on the race. We were kind of tired from being outside a lot, but we told ourselves that we felt great,
We went to the line together, as a team, and we had one goal in mind: to repeat as city champs! The gun went off and we were off. I took the lead immediately and was followed by teammates Olivia Rovin and Sophia Vesley. I started out pretty fast, and for the first time the entire cross country season, I felt good and strong. I finally have gotten over my respiratory illness and everything just clicked in my running. I had a great time running for the first time this season and this was really exciting for me. I didn't break the course record like I tried to do, but I came close.I finished first in 19:05, followed by teammates Olivia Rovin in 2nd, and Sophia Velsey in 3rd. Savannah Broome finished 8th, and Kai Greenless finished 10th, and we got a combined score of 24 points. Teammates Peninah Benjamin was 16th, Rachel Knauf was 25th and Caya Sobota was 45th. We were aiming for a perfect score, but other runners really stepped up and ran well which prevented our perfect score. Everyone did great. Congrats to all.
Our boys team also won a team city title. My teammate Luke Peterson won in a sick time of 16:23 and Ross Porter was runner up.
Ok I am not going to lie, the city course is usually a little short. It's always been about 3.05 on my gps watch. However, this year, it was a legit 5k which kind of really hurt my effort in breaking the course record. I made sure to jokingly give Coach Cuff (my previous coach from my freshman and sophomore year who set up the new and improved course) a hard time. St. Pete High coaches Coach Cuff, and Coach Wheeler,as well as my Shorecrest Coaches Mr. Coach Rabb and Mr. Coach Rabb did a great job of putting on the meet. It ran really smoothly and it was even chip-timed. They are also all great coaches and I'm really glad I've been on both of their teams.
We had the awards ceremony shortly after the boys race and then my teammate Rachel Knauf and I had to go back to school to be in the powder puff football finals. I went to Chik-Fil-A right next to school, and I changed in my car. I then ran into powder puff from the parking lot while finishing my chicken sandwich just as they started playing the National Anthem. Our powder puff team won 26-0 against the juniors (my sister is a junior which made the win even better). That was the 4th straight year the powder puff class of 2014 won the homecoming powder puff game. I played safety and quarterback. I was extremely tired, sweaty, and hungry at the end of yesterday,but it was such a fun day! I wouldn't change a thing.
Congratulations to everyone who ran at Pre-State. I wasn't able to attend because I wanted to be able to run City Championships this Thursday and conference championships Tuesday with my team, and racing three times in five days sounds unsafe and not fun.
