Senior Alvin Garnett finished his final Drake Relays event in solid fashion. The team consisting of Garnett, senior David Lantz, junior Matt Brinkley and freshman Ryan Sander took sixth in the 1600 Sprint Medley. They finished in 3:24.48. Iowa won the medley with a time of 3:16.48.

It was the final Drake Relays event for Lantz and Garnett as well, who learned a lot from the experience.

“Be prepared for whatever happens,” Garnett said. “Prepare for anything to happen because our conference is really fast. It’s really hard to score in our conference, so be prepared for it and make it happen.”

Lantz, a Des Moines native, has grown up running on Drake’s world-famous track. He acknowledged that he will take a few years off from track, but did consider running at this event again unattached after his time off.

The rigors of Division I track haven’t stained his memories of running at Drake.

“I love the Drake Relays,” Lantz said. “I’ve grown up running on this track. It’s a great place to run and I’m going to miss it.”

Having the sixth best time overall sat well with every team member considering they don’t run team sprint events very often.

“I think that for what it was, we all ran pretty well,” Brinkley said.

Garnett was also pleased with his team’s effort. A good finish was especially important to Garnett and Brinkley, who were coming of a disappointing finish in the 4×1600 relay on Friday.

“Everyone gave it their all,” Garnett said. “We’re both seniors, so this is our last time running here. It would have been nice to win it, but we gave it our all.”

The women’s 1600 medley team ended up in 17th place out of 20 teams. Their time was 4:01.16. Senior Ines Fischer, junior Callan Jacobson, sophomore Jordon Andreassen and freshman Dana Christensen made up the quartet.

The time and placing doesn’t appear impressive on a stat sheet, but inexperience did play a factor.

“This is our first time running as a group,” Fischer said. “So we really didn’t know what to expect.”

It was the final event of the Relays for all the team members, all of whom learned valuable lessons.

“We learned that there are a lot of good teams here and that we can compete with some of the best schools out there,” Christensen said. “We proved that this weekend and we’ll take that to Big 12’s and do the same there.”