Highlights of a very fast day included 13 meet records on this, the 3rd year of the Relays. Many of the meet records were not only beaten, they were crushed, often with 2 or 3 schools breaking the previous record.
The marquee event of the Cougar Relays is the Devil Takes the Hindmost; a grueling event where the winner can run as much as 6 miles depending on how many entrants there are. All entrants run 2 laps before the last three runners were removed from the race. The devil continues to remove 3 runners per lap until there are 20 of fewer runners where they begin removing 2 runners per lap. When there are 8 runners remaining, 1 runner is removed per lap until there are only 2 remaining to race it out to the finish. All lapped runners are removed from the race automatically by the devil.
In the girls race, 39 girls toed the line. After 18 laps (31:24) of running and some well thought out strategy, Michelle Levy of Wootton flipped the tables from last year as cruised to victory over Rachel Unger of Poolesville (2004 Champ).
The boys race was just as dramatic. Andrew Jesien of Walter Johnson took the pace out hard early, followed, at time closely by Ben Romney of Northwest. Jesien cruised at an even pace until laps 15 or 16 where he surged to lap the remaining competitors from 4th place back. Alec Triantos of Magruder ran for his life to avoid being lapped, but it was only to earn one more grueling lap before the devil removed him. Jesien cruised easily to victory with Romney in 2nd. Jesien\'s huge move shortened his race dramatically to 17 laps (22:47) which would pay off for his heroics later in the meet. (In the boys DMR, he made up a 40-50 meter on Ryan Janes of Gaithersburg to win the event for WJ. His split was somewhere around 4:15.)
The team titles were close until the very end, with Walter Johnson winning the girls meet 67-57 over Kennedy after only leading by 1 point heading into the last event, the SMR. WJ won the event, Kennedy was 6th. Gaithersburg took home the boys title by a mere 5 points over Northwest. After beating NW by one at the Woodward Relays, and tieing NW in a dual meet on Tuesday, Gaithersburg\'s 5 points was their largest margin of victory this season over NW. Heading into the SMR, Gaithersburg was ahead by one. GB took 2nd in the SMR and NW took 3rd from the previous heat.