GO JOHNNIES CHALLENGE - TOMORROW

Happy Monday everyone. I’d like to start this blog with just a quick reminder that our annual athletics fundraiser, the Go Johnnies Challenge, is tomorrow, September 15th. 100% of your donation goes directly to our budget, and we quite literally could not do a majority of the things we do throughout the cross country and track & field season without the support we receive each year through this fundraiser.

A lot of this money, honestly, goes to the operational expenses we rack up by having a larger roster in both cross country and track & field. We have 38 guys on the cross country team this fall, and our track & field roster usually lands somewhere around 85-90. Buses, uniforms, food after meets — it adds up very fast. We believe in working to give each guy the same experience and give everyone who a) loves to run and b) wants to improve the chance to do just that, thus we carry a large roster and travel everyone to meets.

Aside from that, we are also able to use the money for a multitude of things that we believe significantly improves the experience of our team members and goes above and beyond typical budget expenses, such as:

Off-campus training camp before cross country season every other year in Lutsen, Minnesota
“Travel” meets during the cross country and track & field season. This fall we are taking our top 10 to a meet in Salem, Oregon, and we have regularly gone to track & field meets in California as well each spring.
Normatec Recovery Boots, massage guns, LightSpeed Lift anti-gravity treadmill system, and more tools to aid in recovery and injury prevention
New cross-country uniforms and warmups in 2024 (previous uniforms and warmups were from ~2012)
Team sessions with Sport Psychologists and Dietitians specializing in distance running / endurance sports
And plenty more!

Thank you so much to those of you who have given in the past — and thank you in advance to those of you who will choose to support us again tomorrow. Your support, of any size, really does make an impact on the members of our team each and every year, and I for one want to do everything we can to continue making sure each and every team member has a tremendous experience, like I did, at SJU.

Here is the link to donate: Cross Country/Track & Field · GiveCampus

And now for our season update…

training camp highlights

Each fall, we move back to campus 10 days before the first day of class starts. It is a great way to kickoff the year, be “professional runners” for a week with no class and get everybody together before the business of the school year sets in.

alumni group run & picnic

This year, we kicked off training camp with an alumni group run, picnic and watermelon eating contest spectating at Elm Creek Park in Maple Grove. I thought this was a blast and is a great tradition that we are excited to keep going.

After interviews of Scott Lindell ‘90 and Joe Gathje ‘25, our current team and the 40+ alumni who came out went off on their run together and I prepared the Jimmy John’s lunch that would be waiting for them upon their return.

After the run, we also essentially made a spectacle out of our current team members and their actions in our annual Watermelon Eating Contest for the St. Michael’s Games. I was pretty proud of the size of the watermelons I was able to find at the St. Cloud Walmart, and was even more proud of our fellow alumni Tommy Feichtinger ‘15, Charlie Raasch ‘18, Tommy Allen ‘24 and Aidan Thomas ‘25 for stepping up and representing the alumni by entering a team into the watermelon eating contest.

After applying our first-ever penalty for not being able to hold all their watermelon down to Team Footbridge, we awarded Team Miles Men with the win for the second year in a row. Photo and video highlights below.

TRAINING CAMP HIGHLIGHTS - THE TRAINING

training camp highlights - the fun

first race recap - augustana twilight

For the last handful of years, we have had our first meet of the year be our very own Toni St. Pierre Invitational, which has historically been a smaller meet with just a couple other teams and a 5K distance for the men, which was a nice first meet after the summer of training. Now, in an attempt to get the course that we have been hosting Toni St. Pierre at — River Oaks Golf Course in Cold Spring, MN — into the MIAC conference meet hosting rotation, we decided to move Toni St. Pierre two weeks later (September 18th — this Friday) so that we could run an 8k on the course and allow other MIAC teams to come and see the course for an eventual vote on whether to add the course into the conference meet rotation.

Long story short, we needed to find a new meet for our first race of the year. Many of our guys ran at the Augustana Twilight meet in Sioux Falls, S.D. when they were in high school, and the college race has gotten very competitive as well. With not many other options on this weekend, we decided to give Augustana a try and accept that it’d be a late arrival back to SJU after the race given it starts at 9:15pm with the course being lit up with lights and glowsticks.

Not having seen the course before the meet, it became immediately apparent while I was standing at the 200m mark that a) there were a lot, probably too many, athletes in the field (478 to be exact) and b) too many turns in the course for that many people, let alone the first turn being about 200 meters into the race and being essentially 90 degrees. When the field went by me, there was a big pile up of athletes. Once one athlete in a field of ~500 goes down, obviously many others behind him also get caught up in it and go down as well. I watched this happen in front of me and, not seeing any of our guys on the ground, thought “wow, somehow we didn’t get caught up in that”. Well, little did I know that we didn’t get caught up in it because a number of our guys were probably still getting up off the ground from going down in a fall / pile-up about 100 meters before that. Those who went down included Vincent Kaluza as well as a number of our freshmen and others. Vincent in particular got trampled badly after going down and ended up getting five stitches in his ear the next morning. One of our freshmen, Clayton Hoffman from Glenwood City, WI, tried to keep running but ended up dropping out after his knee just didn’t feel quite right from the fall. Despite all of this, Clayton was our only DNF and everyone else salvaged a solid race effort while moving by many people in the latter stages of the race, which I was glad to see.

Senior Cole Stencel kicked off his season in excellent fashion finishing in 8th place by beating all DII and DIII competitors in the race and only getting beat by six Division I runners and one NAIA runner. Senior Max McCoy, sophomore Erick Montalvo (breakout race), freshman Quinn Carroll and senior Jacob Malecha rounded out our top five putting us 9th as a team out of 33 teams. Senior Vincent Kaluza clawing his way back to being our 6th man and senior Peyton Martinek finishing as our 7th. Senior Lars Molenkamp was the sole member of our top seven from last year who was not able to race here as he is nursing a nagging hamstring from the track season last spring. Lars is back up and running, though, and hoping to debut either this weekend or at the Pre-National meet two weeks later.

Certainly an interesting evening, and I didn’t even mention how the race was delayed until 9:45pm because of the heat that day (still 81 degrees out when we raced). Given everything that happened I’m just glad we left with everyone healthy and able to get back to training, and we are very much looking forward to this weekend’s Toni St. Pierre Invitational in Cold Spring where there will be a lot less runners and a lot more room to run :)

2026 schedule

Hope to see you at a meet this fall. Our conference and region meet are both at St. Olaf, and the 2026 Division III national meet is at Carleton this fall, meaning there are plenty of opportunities to spectate some excellent championship racing in Minnesota this year.

Thank you for following along with our season and I’ll be in touch again soon with a recap of our race this weekend and a breakdown of our exciting freshman class this year, which consists of 16 newcomers. Have a great week.

-Maxwell