Inside the numbers: School records are more than just names

As thrilling as it was to see Kathryn Sheehan and Kristen Traub obliterate yet another school record, it is bittersweet for older coaches like me and my longtime compadre, Phil Kelly, when these longtime marks go bye-bye. In this case, the 10-year-old 3,000-meter outdoor record that they laid waste to with such toughness at Yale on Sunday was held for 10 years by Liza Grudzinski.

Many readers of this fancy blog (other than Phil and me) may just know Liza as a name in the record books. For us, she was and is a living, breathing, heart-and-soul member of our Track Family. “Little Liza” came into Marist in the late 1990s from Connecticut, looking more like an eighth-grader than a college freshman. But her diminutive stature belied a talented, fierce and incredibly tough runner who led our program through a true glory era of MAAC Championships and school-record performances, from the time she walked into the McCann Center until her graduation five years later. Liza is not just a name on the school-record pages for us. She lives on in program lore as one of the best athletes we have ever had.

And the cool thing about Liza is that she is still “chasin’ it” a decade after she left Marist. She has become one of the best mountain runners in the United States. Her marathon debut at Philly in 2012 was nothingshort of remarkable when she ran 2:55:58. And most recently, earlier this month, she blitzed a half marathon in Danbury in a stellar time of 1:24:24. Great stuff!

Such is the cycle of our sport. The cliché goes that records are made to be broken. But when they are broken, we feel joy and nostalgia all at once; joy at our current athletes doing their best and doing something no one has done before, and nostalgia as we remember the athletes who set the bar at that level, whose names are gone from the record books but most definitely not forgotten. Here’s hoping that, God willing if I am still coaching and writing this blog in 2023, I type up a post about some new hot-shot runners lowering the 3km record even more -- all the while waxing poetic about the runners back in 2013 who set standards for future runners and maybe still will be chasin’ it on the roads and trails of the future.

There is no finish line …