Friday, February 1, 2008

Arlington County Championship!

There was a lot of good things happening on the track today. I almost titled this post, "I wasn't going to lose!", as the normally quiet Ashley boldly told me post race when we were discussing her race. That quote summed up an intangible observation of mine tonight about every one of our distance runners.

There was a lot of notable performances if you look just at times as well, and as always, sometimes there is more to the story too.

1600m

As noted earlier, Ashely was a tough runner out on the track tonight. Her time may not have been what she had hoped, but persistence will pay off for her in the long run.

The boys 1600m was a lot of fun to watch. All three guys had good races in my mind, and all for slightly different reasons.

I really wish we could have gotten Alex into the fast heat. The goal was sub 5:00 tonight, and he was on pace through the first 1000m of the race. After that running by himself caught up a little, and he faded just a tad. The great thing though is he went for it, and while he ran the same time as he did a few weeks ago, tonight he did it on his own, and was 3-4 seconds faster than the previous week with 200m to go. With a little more endurance, his time is going to drop fast.

Matt also ran a great race. He ran even splits and passed people at key points during the race. He ran about 10 seconds faster than his previous outing, and was only 3 seconds off his PR from the end of last outdoor season! More good things are in store for Matt both indoors and outdoors.

Andrew ran a great race at well. He responded to challenges by other runners late in the race, ran 14 seconds faster than last week, and it was also a PR!

1000m

Mark was put in a tough position. They ended up dividing the race into two heats. At first they had him in the slow heat, since he didn't have a time. Clearly he needed to be in the fast heat. So a last minute 800 time by me, and we get Mark into the fast heat. Bad news is he is at the back and doesn't have the extra few minutes to get loose. He still ran well, but got stuck out in no mans land. He still held on strong and never gave up, and by my watch sneaked under 3:00.

Manny, like Andrew, ran a PR today. Manny ran about 8-10 seconds faster than he did a few weeks ago, and looked strong on the end. The mantra for him tonight was be relaxed and have confidence, and it seemed to work out well.

Over all we had some PRs, near PRs, and great times considering how the races played out. Every single runner was tough and focused on the track tonight, which is something to be proud of.

All the splits should be updated by the end of tonight, and results will be posted as soon as I get them, hopefully in the next week or so. Also, splits are from my watch, and may not be 100% of what the official results end up as.

Coach Butler

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

we need to buy you a new camara lol...

Andrew

PS: yeah thats my comment up there its a long story

Lewis said...

I think I need to adjust the settings on my camera to take better pictures in cheap fluorescent lighting. A new camera eventually might be in order, but hey, I am a grad student, I should be happy I have food and a bed.

Patrick D. said...

A DJO Track blog? Cool.

I'm a Senior there right now, training for 800m, probably. At the moment, I'm having a bit of trouble getting me 200m speed down to the requisite 25-26s. This is my training log; lots of short sprints, heavy lifts, and fast conditioning circuits. I won't be drawing out any of the run lengths until I already have the speed needed for a fast split time.

Coach, this is something you may want to implement on your blog. You add some extra HTML to your blog template, and then you can make long posts (such as this one) appear in a small preview segment on the main page, with a "Read more..." link to a separate page with just that whole article. Scrolling along very large front pages is a pain.


Thanks,
Patrick Donnelly
DJO Class of 2008