FYI this is a long blog post. A few funny videos and photos at the end from our cross country banquet a few weeks ago. Enjoy!
TRACK APPAREL ORDER
Link here and the store closes at 11:59pm this Sunday, January 11th: https://sjutrackandfield2026.itemorder.com/
THE DAVID FORSTER MEN’S MILE AT SJU INDOOR ALUMNI MEET
I sent out an email to all of our alumni right before Christmas, but wanted to include this announcement here as well.
Starting at this coming year's CSB+SJU Indoor Alumni Meet on Saturday, January 24th, 2026, the men's mile will now be named the "David Forster '11 Men's Mile". For those not familiar with David's story, David graduated from Saint John's in 2011 and was a four-year member of our cross country and track & field teams. After graduating he continued to run and participate in road races before sadly collapsing and passing away suddenly while on a training run in Minneapolis on June 24, 2016 at the age of 27. For the last ten years, David's parents, family and friends put on the Finish the Run 5K at Boom Island Park in Minneapolis to not only honor and remember David, but to also gather people together and empower them to "live intentionally in supporting and assisting others to 'finish the run' through whatever their own life challenges may be". After ten years of putting on this great event, the Forster family decided to make this past September's event the last one before it became overwhelming for those involved in putting it on and to end "at the top of our game", just like where David was with his life when he passed.
Upon thinking more about this Tim, Jeremy and I thought that this could be an appropriate time to honor and remember David in a similar and permanent way on campus while also keeping the spirit of Finish the Run alive by inviting and encouraging all of our alumni to run / race the mile at our indoor alumni meet each year. All alumni who come back to run / race the mile at the meet this year will receive a t-shirt with the below design on it, made from a picture of David and his Johnnie CC teammates mid-race when David was in school (thank you Forster family and little pepper promotions!).
Go for a leisurely one mile run with your old teammates or race the mile all out — it's up to you — but we'd love to have you back on campus and establish this as a new tradition at the meet each year. If we need to have several heats of the mile, we would love that. David's parents, Sandy and David, are planning to be present at the meet and we'd love to see you there too.
If you know you are going to be there and plan to run/race the mile, please RSVP here and also email me your t-shirt size as soon as possible just so we can begin to get a rough idea of how many alumni might participate. A tentative meet schedule is attached here. And if you aren't able to or are not interested in running these days, we'd still love to see you back on campus for the meet and post-meet alumni social in the Quad. Thanks!
Here are a few articles about David as well, for anyone interested:
SEASON RECAP
In short, this past cross country season was not exactly what we were hoping for in August when the season started. Returning our entire top six from our 2024 cross country team — and with three of those six running under 15:00 for 5,000m during this past track season and two more at 15:12 and 15:18 — our hopes were high for our strongest conference and region meet performance in quite a while. A few years ago, I don’t think it would be too harsh to say that a good number of guys on our team were not running as much as they needed to over the summer to set themselves up for success in November. Many were certainly running quite a bit and doing everything they needed to do, but our team as a whole was not entirely on the same page from top to bottom. I feel like this is probably the area that we have grown the most in the last few years, and Tim and I agreed after seeing how much this year’s team, in totality, ran this past summer that it was our best group from top to bottom in terms of summer mileage in quite some time. Unfortunately, with that came a few guys who maybe ran a bit too much and picked up some injuries towards the end of the summer. Several of them from our top five and top ten, too.
Vincent Kaluza, our top man from the 2024 cross country season in 25:08 and a 14:55 guy on the track last spring, picked up a shin/ankle issue right at the end of the summer. First it was the right ankle, then it was the left shin, then it was back to the right ankle… and on and on like that for probably 4-6 weeks. From this Doctor in St. Cloud to that Physical Therapist in Eden Prairie — we tried everything. Vincent did race through most of this, but had missed quite a bit of key training on top of having what we later learned was bronchitis for the conference meet.
Nick St. Peter, our number five / six man from the 2024 cross country season (and a 1:52 800m / 3:54 1500m man on the track) suffered a stress reaction in late August. He ended up being able to come back and race at MIAC and Regions, but like Vincent he had obviously missed significant training time after about six weeks totally off of running. He has been totally healthy and back to training since mid-October now and we are optimistic about a healthy track season for him in his last track season at SJU.
Jacob Malecha, Max McCoy and Collin Berg were others who would’ve likely been in our top five / ten who at some point or another missed time training, significantly impact our depth when Nick and Vince were also unavailable — obviously.
Every team goes through injuries, but I’d be lying if I said I slept like a baby this fall. We were essentially 100% healthy last year, and with little tweaks to our training over the last year I suppose this fall was payback for such a healthy year last year. Overcoming adversity is a worthwhile challenge, and these guys will be stronger runners and stronger people for having had to work through it.
CONFERENCE AND REGION MEET RECAPS
With all the context above, we felt like we did have our best races of the year at the conference and region meets. The region meet, especially, as the little sickness that was running through our team at the conference meet had run it’s course.
Finishing fourth at the conference meet — just six points out of third and 18 out of second — was hard considering if we had just been moderately healthy, or even just if Vincent was not racing with bronchitis, second place as a team looked very doable. Nevertheless, junior Cole Stencel and fifth year Eamon Cavanaugh, who all season long were a source of stability for us, delivered yet another consistent performance in fourth and tenth place individually earning All-MIAC honors. Next was junior Lars Molenkamp — undoubtably this year’s breakout performer of the year — who came up big for us as our third man in 26th place. It was fun to see Lars put together a great cross country season after previously seeing much more success on the track as an 800m runner (1:54 last spring).
With everyone back racing and illness-free at the region meet, it was definitely our best race of the season given all of the above context. Cole Stencel also continued his exciting string of races with a 23rd place finish at the region meet to qualify for nationals.
NATIONAL MEET RECAP
Cole finished 148th at the national meet, which was at the Roger Milliken Center in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and was the 22nd guy from our region — meaning he essentially replicated his region meet performance at nationals. Being more of a 1500m runner, Cole was happy to finish his cross country season on a high note and is looking forward to the track season.
A couple of highlights of our trip, which also completed Tim’s quest to visit all 50 states, was dinner with 2017 Saint John’s alum and 2016 NCAA Steeplechase Champion Ryan Bugler, who lives just about 40 minutes away from Spartanburg in Greenville, S.C. and joined us for Cole’s pre-race meal the night before the meet. Ryan is one of my classmates from SJU, so it was fun to reminisce about the glory days over pasta. After the race, we drove about an hour north into the Great Smoky Mountains to take in some views — with a stop for ice cream of course (Tim’s idea).
BANQUET RECAP
Awards viewing and door prizes above. Photo and video highlights of each banquet event below. A very fun end to the year before the team went home for winter break. Thanks for following along with our blog this fall!
Left - Max and Erick sporting their door prizes. Right - AJ Olesen leaving the banquet with his haul of goods, highlighted by the grand door prize, a Razr scooter with a Nerf gun attached to it. Despite my and Assistant T&F Coach Joe Vardas’ best efforts, we could not get the Nerf gun to operate correctly unfortunately.
GINGERBREAD HOUSE DECORATING CONTEST
Pictured below from left to right: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th place.
SHOW & TELL
Our winning Show & Tell - Connor O’Brien and “little C”
Nick St. Peter (left) with his Bucee mask from his summer internship working for a minor league baseball team, and Connor Dow (right) showing us the lotion he was prescribed this fall to clear up the poison ivy he got (you don’t want to know where) after going to the bathroom in the woods on a run this fall….
Last year’s show & tell winner, Max McCoy, and his submission for this year: Max McCoy vs. the State of Minnesota
ONE ACT PLAYS
Connor O’Brien (purple sweatshirt and sunglasses) as Tim Miles after stealing the sauna door from Cornell College, which is where we stopped to eat dinner while on the way to our meet at Augustana college. This is the actual sauna door from the sauna in the Palaestra that Connor unscrewed, and is a take on the legendary story of when Tim took the sauna door off the sauna in the Bonnie dorm basement so that he could sleep better at night versus being kept up by the hooligans in the sauna late at night. When talking about the mysterious disappearance of the sauna door in The Record a couple weeks later, the SJU Dean of Students was quoted as saying that it looked like a real “professional job”. FYI, Tim will deny knowing anything about this if you ask him about it.
The wedding of Vincent Kaluza (left - played by Nick St. Peter) and Aiden Chalmers (right - played by Eamon Cavanaugh), two close friends on the team. Highlight of this act was Aiden (i.e. Eamon) repeatedly calling Vince “Vincy-poo” during the ceremony.
A reenactment of our distance runners in the weight room helping each other get the bar up while bench pressing.
A grocery cart race at halftime of an SJU football game. Participants were Louis Armstrong (left - played by Adam Marable), Goofy (center - played by Mason Anderson) and Minnie-Mouse (right - played by Connor Dow). And the emcee (far left with blue water bottle) is freshman Nolan Pfeilsticker, who actually was the emcee / on screen talent for the SJU football games this fall. Highlight was Connor’s impression of Minnie-Mouse. This was our winning one act play.
FRESHMEN TIE TYING
Our freshmen attempt to tie their new SJU CC ties (from Saver’s of course) in under 40 seconds to get their St. Michael’s Games teams a bonus point.
Tim teaching the freshmen (and everyone else) the correct way to tie a tie. We’re all about teaching life lessons here.
The last event — named Extra Sensory Perception by Tim, of course — involves me selecting one person from each team to hide behind one of the many doors in the hallway of coach’s offices just outside the J Club Room, then having the rest of each team come out into the hallway to guess which door their teammate is behind — as if they can “sense” it.
This year we also added a fun twist where each team could wager a certain number of St. Michael’s Games points. Get it right and they win that many points. Get it wrong and they lose that many points. Two teams put big wagers in, and shockingly both correctly guessed which door their teammate was behind.
Team Bigotes had a big lead going into this event and decided to wager 0 points, thinking that other teams would wager all of their points, guess incorrectly, and they’d win by a land slide. Well Team Flynntown wagered all of their points, guessed correctly and took home the 2025 St. Michael’s Games title instead.
On one hand, it is fun that every team could still theoretically win it up until the very last event. But on the other hand, the wagering does sort of make the rest of the St. Michael’s Games events throughout the season less important because you could just wait until the banquet and hope you guess the correct door. There was quite a bit of uproar about the wagering this year after Team Flynntown came out of nowhere to win, so we’ll see if we do it again next year.
Hope you had a great holiday season with your family, happy new year and thanks again for reading!
Hope to see you at the indoor alumni meet on January 24th!
-Maxwell
