Federations

Yesterday was the NY State Federation Cross Country meet down in Wappinger's Falls, NY. It's on the banks of the Hudson River, in Bowdoin Park. The photo above is a nice panoramic of the park. The Federation Championships is a big meet. Only the best teams in the state get to go. The fact that Liverpool was even invited to run in the Federation meet is an huge honor. They only invite the top 25 teams in the whole state.

 

Eric and I drove down the night before the meet and stayed in a hotel in Poughkeepsie. Which was only a few miles north of Wappinger's Falls. We found this fun diner to have dinner. The food was excellent.

 

And they even served beer. Even better!

 

 

We always pass the time taking silly pictures of each other. I love the perspective of the plate in the picture I took vs. the picture that Eric took. It's the same plate. Really.

 

Here's a picture from the park the morning of the big race. It weather was beautiful, for November 17th. Temperatures were in the 50s and there was not a cloud in the sky.

 

I posted the race photos on Facebook, if you haven't seen them yet. This is after the race during the awards ceremony. The team placed 6th overall. Which is excellent. It's actually the 3rd best place that a Liverpool team has ever achieved at this meet. The meet itself was insane. I have never witnessed anything like it. 250 of the fastest kids in the entire state running as fast as they could for 3.1 miles. They were neck and neck the entire way. I can't imagine just trying not to fall or get tripped. It was elbow-to-elbow pretty much the whole way. There was only 58 seconds between 2nd place and 75th place. Which means kids were finishing faster than 1 per second. And trying to take pictures was crazy too, there were just so many kids all crammed together.

 

 

I actually managed to get a picture of 2 Liverpool kids, including Alex, in this shot. I think I took 20 pictures from this spot, and only had 3 with any Liverpool runners in it.

Here's a fun picture of all the parents that made the trek down. These are a great group of people. It's fun to have created friendships with all of them. It's going to be strange not to see them all every week. Only half of the boys do indoor track (3 of the top 7 are swimmers), so I guess I'll see the rest in the Spring...