IHSA State XC 50 Years at Detweiller Park

[Conor Dary]

Amazingly Virgin's 1972 record finally went down yesterday....

Josh Methner Arlington Heights (Hersey) 13:49.86 4:37/M SR




https://www.ihsa.org/IHSAState/IHSAS...in-Peoria.aspx

[midwestfan]

Great article and lots of memories. Best ISHA race I saw was in 1999 when Don Sage from York going after Virgin's record. I went with Ken Popejoy, Rick Wholhuter, and Tom O'Hara to see history made. Perfect weather and at the gun I could only see in the back of the pack of runners sprinting away from the starting line, seven green uniform runners from York running as a group and dead last from the other 150+ runners. Coach Newton's instruction, I guess was the team runs together the first half mile. We could hear the splits over the speaker and Sage's name was not mentioned at the half mile mark or mile mark. (He ran a slow 4:41 with his teammates). He then busted out to try to catch the leaders and had a difficult time passing many runners to capture lead at 2 miles. He won by 40 yards but in a slow time of 14:03 (13 seconds of Virgin's record.
I criticized Coach Newton for letting Sage drop back to run as a "York pack" for the first mile when his team won their 20th title with a 27 year old record for aggregate time by over a minute. They had 6 runners make All State Honors and all were under 15:00 minutes with 5 runners in the top 12 places.
If Sage was given instructions to go out and run his own race as he did in many meets during the year I believe he would have come close and maybe even gotten the record that day. He usually went out in 4:30-4:35 and would have no interference with the pack runners.
This year was unbelievable from both men's and women's races.
It is a great historic event. I never was allowed to run in the state meet way before this era since we were in the Catholic league back then and they weren't in the IHSA. It would have been fun and challenging to run with the best in the state back then.
Hope you are doing well in "Scandal Town" We have our occasional scandas here also. (I realize Portland and Eugene are different cities).

[DrJay]

I'd post this in Current Events so those who don't often look at Historical get to see it. It's kind of a must-see, especially with so much crappy news floating around.

[Conor Dary]

Excellent idea!

[Conor Dary]

That's weird about Sage....passing a mob on that course is something else....he had no chance going after that record....

It's been tough lately in Scandal Land...fortunately Eugene is far enough from Portland that we feel safe here...