Bang. The runners take off, hundreds of them. All running towards that one goal. Winning. And that’s just what the Atoms did at the Great American Cross Country invitational.

The AHS boys Cross Country team placed second in their race, the varsity B race. With their top two runners for the race, Aviad Gebrehiwot and Draven Pike, coming in seventh and 11th place respectively. The team had at least two runners that did well.

The key to the second place finish however, was not the top placing runners on the team. “The race was so close, and our first two runners did extremely well, but the rest of the pack came through for us,” head coach Dave O’Hara said. “The key to the race was that there was only seven seconds in between our third fourth and fifth runners.”

After the race the atoms knew that they had done well, but they did not know just how well they had done. “The win came as a bit of a shocker. We’ve never really gotten any awards as a team. I remember we were doing our cooldown, just satisfied with the race, when Coach O’Hara came sprinting towards us, hands waving in the air like an ecstatic madman to announce that we had earned second place,” senior Hung Truong said.

This win did not come lightly to the atoms. The hard work that they do each day has really paid off and that can be seen in this accomplishment. “Each day we run anything between nine miles on a long run day, and sixteen, 400 meter repeats,” O’hara said. “It ain’t for the average soul,” Truong said. The boys hard work really paid off in this large North Carolina race.

“This race was definitely a huge confidence booster for most of the varsity guys and gave them an idea of what they are capable of,” sophomore Aviad Gebrihiwot said. The race definitely shows that even after losing a lot of important seniors last year, the team can still come together and win important races.

This issue of the A-Blast publishes too early to get stats for the Octoberfest Invitational and Patriot Invitational, but the team is looking forward to continuing their success from North Carolina in future races. “If we can continue to tighten our pack time then I think we have a very good chance of winning a lot more races,” O’Hara said.

“I think this race has a lot to say about our future, even though we lost some good runners, we could still pull out a great win,” Gebrehiwot said. The Atoms are looking to continue to win races and advance into the Patriot District Tournament.