Ithaca’s Sauer succeeds at sectional meet

While it technically wasn’t the Section IV Championships, the Section IV cross-country end-of-season meet served that purpose April 24 in Chenango Valley. The Section was split into several heats as runners from Tompkins County were grouped with Cortland and Cayuga county schools. Afterward, the results from the four heats were merged to tally the official results.

Ithaca boys cross-country placed third in the section as a team, with senior Tommy Sauer leading the way with a 12th-place individual finish overall, winning his race.

The COVID-19 protocols went beyond just splitting up the Section into smaller heats. There was limited warmup time and no contact among teams, leading to a unique experience for Sauer and the rest of this team.

“The way they ran it actually was they had all the buses from Tompkins County come in about 15 minutes before the race was scheduled to begin,” Sauer said. “Then, every boy who was racing had to go over the line and you just started. There was no time to warm up. They did want to limit contact in between teams. It was well-run, but it was different than normal.”

Without the warmups, Sauer and the other runners were essentially going in blind to the course, whereas they are typically allowed to survey the area before running.

“It was just a really fast course,” Sauer said. “We didn’t actually have a chance to look at it before we raced but it was a lot of pavement, a lot of good return on the feet. It was just a good day of feeling really good going into it. I was running with a lot of boys right around my pace, and we kept it fast.”

Sauer finished with a time of 17:25, which was six seconds faster than his second-place teammate, Cade Eells, in their heat. Beforehand, the Little Red made sure they were prepared for the lack of a warmup by getting an early morning run in.

“It was interesting,” Sauer said. “It’s not something we’ve done before. We had to do a shakeout run in the morning. We actually all got up early before getting on the bus and did a little warmup then. It was tricky and something we’re not used to, but it seemed to work out.”

The team did something similar in the offseason as well, taking matters into their own hands when facing an uncertain season. During the winter, the Little Red continued to run to stay ready for whenever the season began.

“This fall, it was looking like we weren’t going to have any cross-country season and it was going to go straight into track, if anything, come May, and that was going to be about it,” Sauer said. “We didn’t even have a coach. We were transitioning between coaches, so me and a couple other boys decided to run through the winter. Then, on March 1, the day that we got some semblance of clearance, we got a new coach [Christopher McClure], and he said we’re going to put together a six-week season and we’ll see what comes out of it.”

That glimmer of hope meant a lot to Sauer, who was hoping to get one final cross-country season in before graduation.

“All the boys that had been running all winter, we’ve been looking for that opportunity,” he said. “We know we missed it, we wanted to race, and they threw us a little bone. They said, ‘Let’s get out there. We don’t know how many races we can get. We don’t know if we’re going to have a championship. But six weeks.’ That’s what we had, and it went well.”

They were more than happy with a shortened season and running with a mask on as the alternative was not having a season at all. Sauer believes the returning runners will flourish next year after pushing through this season.

“When you race, it’s full mask,” he said. “You can’t pull it down halfway through the race or anything like that. That was kind of difficult. It was something that we hadn’t faced before. But I think next year, when we get those masks off, we’re going to be really fast.”

Sauer was the only senior from Ithaca’s team present at the end-of-season meet, meaning the six other runners who ran at the meet will be back next year. As for Sauer, he will be staying local for college in the fall as he’ll be heading to Cornell University to study pre-medicine.