Last week, sophomore Julius Achon anchored George Mason's distance medley and 4x800 relay teams to victory at the Penn Relays and earned MVP honors. Still, skeptics said that Illinois senior Marko Koers deserved the award more because he ran faster splits (3:57 in the 1600 to Achon's 3:59 and 1:44 in the 800 to Achon's 1:48) in losing efforts.

Well, it only took Achon a week to prove what Koers was indeed up against as he clocked the fastest open 800 in collegiate regular season history, winning the GMU Spring Invitational. Running against six current or former Patriots in the fast section of the event, Achon clocked an amazing 1:44.55 to dip under Mark Everett's (Florida) 1990 record of 1:44.70 as recognized by Track & Field News. Other collegians have run faster than that time (including Oregon's Joaquim Cruz's 1:41.77 in Cologne, Germany in 1984, GMU's Abdi Bile's 1:44.47 in Berlin, West Germany in 1987), but none have done so during the collegiate season against mainly collegiate competition.

"That was a pretty awesome run," said head coach John Cook, who currently tutors five of the six athletes in the race. "Especially since we trained hard the whole week. I think he's pretty amazing but the entire field was even more incredible. Usually you have to go to the Kenyan national trials to see that many guys run that fast together."

Achon, a native of Kampala, Uganda, also broke his country's national record by nearly a second. He will compete next at the IC4A Championships in two weeks in the 1500. That meet will be held in Fairfax.