CSB competes at MIAC championships

The St. Ben’s cross country team was rewarded a treat this Halloween season as they placed third out of the 12 Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Associations (MIAC) teams this past Sunday in the MIAC Championships.

Looking to avoid any tricks, the Bennie squad is getting ready to keep building as a program and continue their journey to ranking nationally once again. Through hard work, Bennies are fully prepared for what lies ahead.

“I think one of the things that you get the chance to see is how well our team trained this summer and how much our returners improved because of the work they put into their training,” head coach Robin Balder-Lanoue said.

The extra training has caused several team members to improve their personal records. Senior Lucy Lyngen placed 130th at the conference meet last year and this year moved up to 36th place.Senior Keiley Maahs placed 64th a year ago, and she placed 23rd this year.

“At least 15 returners are faster than they were the year before because of the summer training they put in.”

One of the Bennies’ senior leaders, Fiona Smith, saw her times improve in what makes this season outshine previous ones.

“I have been able to hit some of the time goals, so I think compared to last season that’s kind of stood out to me,” Smith said.

Another Bennie senior, Annie Kiolbasa, said she’s been happy to see the upperclassmen’s success this year on the team.

“I would say that one of the biggest highlights of this season is that all of our seniors have been doing really well. We have six seniors on the team this year, and we’ve all beat our personal records by quite a bit,” Kiolbasa said. “Five of our top seven are seniors, so that’s been really fun because I think everybody wants a healthy and successful season their senior year.”

The Bennies visited the East Coast for the Connecticut College Invitational in Waterford, Conn., competing against some of the nation’s highest-ranked teams.

In the race including six nationally ranked schools, the St. Ben’s cross country team left with a lot to be proud of after laying it all out on the course.

“We had, like, 24 personal records that weekend,” Smith said.

With the MIAC Championship done, the St. Ben’s squad used the meet to get a sense of what to anticipate for NCAA Regionals. The cold conditions of the course came at the perfect time to get a sense of what the future weather will be like as fall begins its transition to winter.

“We really pushed through the elements of the cold and just stayed positive, even though it’s kind of tough when you’re not really used to running in 30 degrees,” Kiolbasa said. “We actually ran this course earlier in the season at the Carlton Running of the Cows meet. Just about everybody improved their time since we ran it earlier in the season, even though it was tougher conditions this time, so that shows a good amount of improvement for our team.”

Monday night marked the first snowfall of the season, but the team doesn’t seem worried about the colder weather.

“We are used to running in this weather. I’m not really worried about cold weather running for us. We all seem to handle it pretty well,” Smith said.

Now that the season is wrapping up, the job is far from over, as finishing nationally ranked and running in the NCAA Nationals are at the end of the team’s finish line.