Marquez makes All-League Cross Country Team in runup to Super Dome County Championships
October 23, 2024 at 9:31 p.m.
Port Chester Rams junior distance running ace Santiago Marquez made the All-League Cross Country Team for the second consecutive year with a seventh place finish in the League Championships last Tuesday (10/15) at Croton, finishing right on the heels of runners from Horace Greeley and Fox Lane, two schools considered among Westchester's best in ultra-competitive Section 1.
In so doing, Marquez raced the 3.1-mile distance 15 seconds faster than he did when running against some of the same runners in a mega-dual meet over the same course earlier in the season.
The top Lady Ram
Alexa Aquiriano ran 1:20 faster than she had run over the same course earlier in the season and just missed making the All-League Team as the Lady Rams’ leading lady.
"But her 80 seconds improvement in her time was phenomenal and she is well on her way to becoming an All-League runner," according to P.C. head cross country coach Cindy Reyes Martinez, a former Lady Rams running great back in the day.
In fact, every Ram and Lady Ram competitor improved their times, that hard running group including Christopher Zamara, Anthony Delgado, Ethan Cabrera, Jayden Avalar, Sebastian Oliveros, Jencarlos Contreras, Andy Jimenez and Abigail Pesantez.
Out of that group, Marquez is the only one to break five minutes for the mile run, with 5 minutes flat still the Lady Rams’ record for that distance set by Martinez, now a language teacher in the Port Chester School District.
Long schlep to Dome
Martinez predicts the team will continue to show further improvement in the County Cross Country Championships Saturday (10/26) at the Hudson Valley Sports Super Dome in Milton in Ulster County, a long schlep from Port Chester but hopefully worth the bus ride.
Especially if Marquez keeps lowering his times and upping his order of finish as he keeps getting closer to college athletic scholarship distance running times. That represents quite an accomplishment because he is already the school's best competitive swimmer in history and may be even better on land as a runner. That is a tribute to how hard he has trained over the summer running mile after mile, building up the power in his stride so he can now compete against the area's best.
Splash or run indoors
It also leads to something of a dilemma for Marquez because he must decide whether he will stick to Track & Field during the upcoming winter indoor season or go out for the Rams swim team, a nice problem to have because he is college scholarship material in both sports.
The entire team will take a breather and work for a good cause Friday (10/25) at SUNY Purchase at 4 p.m. by giving back to the sport as volunteers at the SUNY Purchase Middle School X-Country Invitational. The multi-school event is run by Liam McGuirk, the former Port Chester cross country coach who helped mold Martinez into a distance running ace during her school days here and is now the SUNY Purchase head cross country coach.
Under McGuirk, the annual race has developed into one of Westchester's best Middle School x-country events.
It makes for a perfect showcase for some of the younger runners who will someday be racing in the County Championships at the Super Dome. And the run around the SUNY campus will be indicative of how good the current mod squad will be.
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