GRANITE CITY – In the space of a bit more than a year, Edwardsville’s Abby Korak may have arguably established herself as one of the area’s top runners, thanks to performances in the 2017 girls track season for the Tigers and now the starting cross-country season.
For EHS, Abby Korak led the way Saturday with a 14th-place finish out of 319 runners at the First To The Finish Meet in Peoria. She finished in 17:55, breaking 18 minutes for the second time this season.
Korak paced the Tigers to first in Saturday’s Granite City Invitational meet with a second-place finish with a EHS first – the first female cross-country runner to break 18 minutes in a meet other than the IHSA state meet, covering the three-mile course over Granite City’s Wilson Park and the Granite City High School campus in 17:48.43, finishing behind Waterloo’s Jenna Schwartz, who turned in a 17:32.01 clocking.
Korak, a sophomore, led the Tigers to a team win with 33 points as the Tigers finished 2-4-6-9-12 and also had runners in 14th and 15th places on the day.
Conditions were unusually near-perfect for early September in Granite City – the temperatures were in the mid-50s at the start of the day and got up only into the mid-60s by the end of the meet with sunny, clear skies. “It’s really good racing weather,” Korak said. “It’s not too hot, not too cold – it’s just perfect.
“I really like this course because it’s flat and it goes by really fast.”
Korak’s main goal going into the season was to run in the 17s. “I was hoping this season to get to 17 (minutes) and I was happy to do that early in the season, so now I’m just going to keep hoping for PRs; I think the team’s going to be really good this year and we’re hoping for top 10 in the state (Class 3A meet, set for Nov. 4 at Detweiler Park in Peoria); we’ll just see what we can do and keep working hard as we can as a team.
“We hope the team can win as many meets as we can and up in Chicago, show them what we’ve got and do the best we can there.”
As far as off-season training went, the workouts varied by day. “We had just regular days and some days, we’d do harder workouts,” Korak said. “We were really training hard over the summer. It wasn’t terrible this summer (as far as hot weather went); it was actually pretty cool.”
