Winter Classic Track & Field Meet #1

I still don’t know why I thought running short distance events at a track meet would be a good idea. All through high school, I was never a fan of distance running and when I say distance running I mean anything longer than 3 miles. When I was in cross country, I always thought, ‘why do we have to run so many more miles just to race 3?!’ But even when we raced 3 miles, it still felt like a long distance for me (most likely because I always started off too fast and die out toward the end…like I still do in half marathons!). So I usually welcomed the arrival Track and Field season in the spring. Only problem is that track events were just as difficult as cross country, only for a shorter distance. Either way, I must have forgotten that fact when I decided to attend this track meet 9 years later. I’ve also been in a running slump and wanted to change things up and participate in something other than a half marathon, which I ran the past two weekends in a row. Quick results: 1,000 Meters: 3:14 (5:05 min/mile) and 3,000 Meters: 11:40 (6:19 min/mile). It’s not bad, it’s actually pretty good and close to what I hit when I ran a one mile time-trial a couple of years ago.

The actual results aren’t too bad, it’s definitely faster than I had expected (then again, I’ve never raced those distances before…) But position-wise, it was pretty terrible. I thought it was going to be a bigger event, but considering it was $10 for 3 events, I shouldn’t have. It was basically a high school run event and a pretty low turnout; most of the runners were from the team with a few older runners here and there. But it was still nice participating in the event nonetheless. Boy, did I get whipped by those highschoolers! For the 1000 meters, we started in our own lanes but when the race started, we all fell into lanes 1 and 2. After 3-400 meters I started to fall back and eventually finished last, which is sad. I was breathing pretty hard during and after that race I was coughing a lot, which made me wonder if it was congestion in the air or maybe ran harder than I thought.

I was seriously considering passing on the 3000 meters just because I knew how tough it was going to be. They actually combined the men’s and women’s race which made me even more nervous. I only ran the 2 mile in high school track once and it was tough running 8 consecutive laps; it was pretty boring. Good thing this was only 7 and a ½ laps, right? But once I got over the fact that I wasn’t going to win the race and knew the kids were going to beat me, I just ran my own race. The laps passed by faster than I thought. The only sad part was when I started to slow down toward the end, I got passed a few times and actually got lapped by the leaders! But I survived with a decent time. I decided to pass on the 600 meter race and just call it a day. I’m still undecided as to whether or not I’ll run these races anymore, but I am literally the sorest I’ve ever been in quite some time, so that either means I ran really hard or am way too out of shape!