Trail Running Blog

First Day of Track & Field Practice

Tuesday, February 12, 2002
Workout: Medium/comfortable to Duarte
Time: Avg/pretty good weather: sunny/hot

Today was officially the first day of Track and Field (finally!). The months in between cross country and track and field were pretty hard because it was only a small group of people running together (if any). And because it was not mandatory practice, it was hard to feel motivated to show up everyday. But I guess because there was a fair amount of dedicated runners meeting everyday, it helped me continue to show up and run. What I also like about having the track and field season finally start is that it’s nice to have the support of your teammates, which help push you to run harder and get faster. Having those ‘cheerleaders’ on the side of the track while you’re running your intervals help tremendously. It felt pretty good seeing all the runners coming out and stretching together on the track. I felt really at ease because it was my second year running track and field and I knew a lot more runners than I did last year. And I guess I was one of the more experienced, veteran runners and there will be a lot of new runners that will be looking up to us for advice.

Running Assignments

When we split up to our individual groups, the distance runners (2 milers, milers, and 800 meter runners) met up on the trail to start their run. Sergio suggested that we (the more experienced runners) run anywhere between Camino and the Railroad. So I decided to pick in between the two to Duarte. 

Picking People Off

When we started running, I saw a bunch of runners that just started track today and haven’t been running just take off with a big lead from me. I felt bad because I have been running for a while now and those guys were beating me. But it could have also been that everybody started running too fast and would not be able to keep up the pace. It was the latter because I eventually started catching them one-by-one. I passed Ray at the playground right before Camino. Pat stopped at Camino, but I’m sure if he kept running, I would have eventually caught him. I also passed another runner at Camino. So there were only two more runners ahead of me now.

The Outcome

I finally got to Duarte and rested for a while. When we finally started heading back, the two ran at a slightly faster pace, but I did not try and keep up with them. Eventually though, I was able to catch up to them. As I ran passed one of them, it looked like he was pretty tired, so I just passed him and started to pick up the pace some more. I caught a lot of ground on the other runner ahead of me, but was not able to catch him. I also thought the first runner that I passed was really close behind me, but when I finished the run, I realized he was pretty far behind. This was a pretty good first day of Track and Field practice and I hope those weeks (or months) of running while everyone else was “resting” (not running) paid off.

Image courtesy of iowa_spirit_walker