Fantastic 4x800 at the Drake Relays
We’ve had quite the last couple of weeks since my last post. I’ll start with our 4x800m relay team’s school record breaking run at the Drake Relays a couple of weeks ago — wow! From left to right in the main photo above, which was also their order during the race, our team of junior Owen Montreuil, junior Nick St. Peter, sophomore Max McCoy and senior Tommy Allen broke our 54-year-old school record of 7:38.60 by Brian Racette, Bill Seidl, Greg Cook and Chuck Way from 1971 by running 7:35.84 with splits of 1:54.72, 1:54.51, 1:54.86 and 1:51.77, respectively. Not that the 4x800 is run all that often, but we now sit 16th all-time in Division III history with that mark.
We knew they could do it, but knowing we had to average about 1:54.6 across all four legs, it appeared as if it was going to be really close through the first three legs. That is until Tommy Allen got the baton. In Tommy’s words, his first lap felt like he was running the 4x400 relay as opposed to the 4x800. When I saw Tommy’s split of 53.02 for the first 400m I thought this was either going to be really good…. or really bad. Well, Tommy (the already 4x MIAC Champion) obviously ended up coming through for us with the huge anchor leg, which was about three years in the making for him, and a lot of excitement ensued when we saw our time pop up on the scoreboard and knew we had finally gotten the record. For those who might remember, Tommy won the MIAC Outdoor 800m in 2022 as a sophomore and also ran 3:52.03 for 1500m in that same year before having some injury struggles the last couple of years where he really didn’t get a chance to see what he could truly do outdoors. After following up his big anchor leg at Drake with a 1:52.61 open 800m last week heading into the conference meet this weekend, I’m excited to see what else Tommy has in store for us this season to cap off his excellent career at SJU.
A couple of other notable results since my last post have come from sophomore Cole Stencel, who ran a great 1500m of 3:53.95 at the University of Minnesota the night before me and the 4x800 relay guys left for Drake. Cole then followed that up the next week with a nice PR in the 5,000m of 14:45.71. Cole now sits #11 all-time as well as the #2 sophomore in SJU history for both the 1500m and 5,000m.
Nick St. Peter also had a very nice run of 3:54.28 in the 1500m last week at our meet at Hamline to tie Mitch Grand ‘23 for 14th on the all-time list.
OUTDOOR MIAC PREVIEW
We are very excited to be kicking off the 2025 Outdoor MIAC Championships later today at Macalester College and would love to see you there this evening or during the day tomorrow! I think we have a fantastic chance to have at least one guy score in every distance event, as well as pretty much every other event on the track and in the field too, honestly. The team race should be very close between us and Bethel, with St. Olaf lurking close behind.
The events kick off today at 2:00pm and tomorrow at 12:00pm. I’ve included a photo of the meet schedule below as well as the live results and live stream links.
Thanks for following along!
Maxwell
