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 attached 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 15:21 — our hopes were high for a strong conference meet performance and a good chance to earn our first trip back to the national cross country meet as a team since 2008. 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.
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. Nick ended up being able to come back and race at MIAC and Regions, but he had obviously missed significant training time after about six weeks totally off of running and was not his usual self. 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.
Vincent Kaluza, our top man from the 2024 cross country season in 25:08 and a 14:55 guy on the track last spring, also 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 like Nick had missed quite a bit of key training on top of having what we later learned was bronchitis for the conference meet.
Jacob Malecha, Max McCoy and Peyton Martinek 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 for the entire year last year, and with little tweaks to our training, I suppose the running gods were just making up for lost time this season.
CONFERENCE AND REGION MEET RECAPS
With all the context above, I 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, while being a far cry from what I think this team’s potential best race could’ve been, it was definitely our best race of the season given all of the above context. In what is absolutely the most competitive of Division III’s ten regions, we finished 13th of 31 teams. In this season’s first regional ranking, we were ranked seventh as a team. The NCAA ended up selecting the top six teams for the national meet this year.
NATIONAL MEET RECAP
A definite bright spot of the season was junior Cole Stencel qualifying for the national meet by finishing 23rd at the region meet. 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 by the way, 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 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, and stop for ice cream of course.
