For one last time, Jack Stoney took a bite out of a pineapple with his cross country teammates this fall. A captain of the Oakton High School team, Jack continued the quirky tradition of biting into (“not cutting!”) a pineapple during a postseason meet. It marked the end of a chapter in what has already been an impressive running career.
Jack noticed his running talent at a young age, when he ran purely for fun. Once he joined his high school cross country team, he was hooked.
During the summer, Jack says he lives a low-key lifestyle of hanging out with friends and training. His off-season mileage paid off this year with a first place finish at the Virginia High School League 6A state championships. At the 2012 state meet, he finished 11th overall, but knew there was room for improvement.
“This is my last race, basically,” he thought going into this year’s race. With this confidence, Jack pushed the pace for a 15:24 finish on what he says is one of his favorite race courses in Virginia.
“It hurt a lot,” he said of his 11-second margin victory. “Quite painful.”
Jack was the first male runner from his school to win the state meet since 1978, leading Oakton to a sixth place team finish. That performance was followed by Jack’s second trip to the Foot Locker South Region Championships, where he finished 22nd and set a 5k PR of 15:15. Still, he admits he could have run faster.
Now that cross country is over, he’s looking forward to the spring: “I like track a lot better,” he said. “I’m more of a miler. The shorter the better, really.”
[button-red url=”http://www.runwashington.com/2013/12/16/runwashington-high-school-cross-country-team/” target=”_self” position=”left”]More of the All-RunWashington team[/button-red]An aspiring lawyer, Jack’s coursework includes AP courses in Government, Macro- and Microeconomics and Calculus. He’s still considering college choices, but two things are certain: he wants to major in business or economics, and he will continue running wherever he winds up. Twenty years from now, he imagines himself working as a lawyer, as long as he can be somewhere warm.
“I like snow,” he said, “but I don’t like the cold aspect, so I have mixed feelings about it.”
Given the hypothetical choice to run with any person, living or dead, Jack gave a peculiar response:
“I would like to go on a group of run with my friends, the BCO, and we would have a great time talking of adventures,” he described with mischief. BCO doesn’t stand for anything in particular, he explained; it’s just a term that’s stuck with his buddies since freshman year.
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