Last week we raced in Boise, Idaho at the prestigious Bob Firman Invitational. Reviewing that race, we dished out letter grades for the boys' team and individual efforts. The team received a B+ while two of the seven received A's. Ian Palmer was one of those two runners. That means that we felt Ian could not have run much better. Ian (a fine student) looks like he found a way to do a whole bunch of "extra credit" for the Nike race by running another 28 seconds faster! Albeit that this course was a faster course, but experts say only by 7-8 seconds. So a twenty second improvement was more than enough to get him an A+, so we will need to declare his grade for this race as A++! His time of 16:33.9 was enough to move him from 10th to 9th on the Panther All-Time list.
just having fun." This is a variation of one of our quotes from last month of "Winning is more fun than just having fun." Last year Elle Thomas had a lot of fun running at the Nike Portland meet. With her gleaming smile, she was having so much fun, it was like she forgot to run hard. This year's Nike race was totally different. After being lectured by the coaching staff that she fell into the same racing mindset earlier in the season, she came out focused and determined to make up for last year. Out of 399 girls, Elle brought her game face and placed 10th and set a new middle school record with a time of 11:32.1, breaking the old record by 2.3 seconds. Although she smiled all through the race last year, her smile AFTER this race towered over last year's efforts!