Track and Field: Not for the Faint of Heart

Alright, well, I probably could have predicted that a post like this would be written at some point. It's the first official roar on the Rant and Roar Running blog. This will be no surprise to my fellow teammates and other track and field athletes. Most track athletes have experienced this scenario at some point.

So, in latest news, I ran the 1500 at Occidental College in LA.  I feel like I raced pretty well, I was 4th, but the time of 4:15 was not great. Unfortunately, I got put in the slowest of 3 sections. This was probably due to having a PB from 2 years ago and having an off year last year, so it makes it much more difficult to get into fast sections of meets. Basically, you're only as good as your last race.... and when you can't get into a fast section to run a fast race, this makes things extremely difficult. It's pretty tough to run fast by yourself out front or in slower races where you get dialed into a slow pace and are stuck behind people running slower than what your ideal pace should be.

On a similar vein, I tried to run fast tonight at the Tempe High Performance Meet in Tempe, Arizona. I was feeling great and thought that I could give it a shot on my own. Although I was on pace at 800, I was thrown off pace due to a pacemaker that was slowing down considerably. I was way off goal pace with 400 to go so I decided to just finish strong. I won it in 4:16.

The crappy thing about this sport is that you can have the best practices in the world, Olympic calibre, but if you can't post an official time, you can't get into highly competitive races. With so few races available, it's no wonder that distance runners have such a tough time making major teams.

Anyway, I'm not giving up yet, I've got a few more shots. But it helps to get the roar out.

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Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight.

Got to kick at the darkness til it bleeds daylight.

(Bruce Cockburn, Lovers in a Dangerous Time).