His First First Place!!!

Yesterday was Kyler's second-to-the-last Greater Spokane League cross country meet. After running varsity on Saturday, he was back to running JV since the seniors who'd been out taking the SAT were back.This JV team runs in a very tight pack. In this picture below you can see (from left to right in the orange and black) Connor, Scott, Davis, mysterious boy whose name I don't know, Kyler, another mystery boy and Grafton. Connor, Davis, Kyler and Grafton are the top four runners on the JV team.Kyler and Grafton (who are VERY good friends) have been battling it out all year for 3rd and 4th place on the team... going into this race, they were 4-4.Connor (on the left above) has been dominating all of their races. He's taken first place for the team every race this year. In this picture below, he's already pulled ahead of the pack... Conner had already passed when I took this picture. Lewis and Clark was hosting yesterday's race at their 'home' course. It's held at beautiful Manito Park. You can see the course map here... The course takes the runners up the famous Manito sledding hill twice - once at the very beginning of the race and again near the end. This is an interesting course, because once they go up the hill, you don't see them for awhile... they run up the hill, run around for awhile at the top and then come back down the hill. Yesterday, the second time up the hill, Connor was nicely ahead of Davis, Kyler and Grafton. When the runners started coming down the hill, we saw Conner first, then about 20 yards behind was Kyler - who had pulled WAY ahead of the other two boys. You can see here he's running his own race... little did anyone know, he had his sights set on Connor. (I've never seen him run as strong as he ran down this hill... he was a complete powerhouse.)
This picture above is of Kyler and Connor coming around the final corner into the chute. By now, Kyler had closed the 20 yard gap to about a 3 yard gap. It was going to be a race to the finish...See the determination on his face? And Connor's effort written all over his? This is what makes Cross Country such a fun sport to watch...And that's the last picture I got of the race because I had to put my camera down to see the finish... I knew it would be neck-and-neck. Kyler literally leaned into the finish line and won the race. An incredible finish for him... I'm thrilled that he got to experience it. Grafton told me afterwards that as he started coming down the hill and looked ahead to see Kyler catching Connor "I knew there was no way I was going to catch Kyler so I started praying that Kyler would win the race and that I could beat Davis."

God answered both prayers.

And for those of you who might have been wondering about Kyler's girl/friend - she was at the meet and Savannah managed to sneak this picture... (her name's Emma - isn't she cute?)