A pretty interesting weekend as I ran at Conference USA for U of H. A quick summary:

Friday:
I ran the 800 prelims in 1:54.4, taking 2nd in my heat. Top 2 advanced automatically so all I did was put myself in position and then cruise in. I was pleasently surprised by how easy it felt. I shut it down with probably a 100m left and just cruised it in basically walking across the finish line. If I would have switched it into another gear or not shut it down I think I could have easily ran 1:53 mid, which would have been an 800 indoor pr, but no need for that in the prelims.

After that I had the DMR. I was a little worried because I had only raced once before this and definately had not done any of the workouts needed to get ready for a double. The plan was just to run my own race and get into a good rhythm. I ended up leading the whole leg going by the first 200 in 29.5 and then clicking off 30s or so with a pickup the last 100m. The UTEP kenyan just sat on me the whole time and tried to go around me twice on the last lap. The first time I surged a little making him settle back in behind and then he tried to come off the turn and outkick me. He pulled even but then I held him off as Jason Perez got the baton in the lead for us. Jason handed off just a little behind UTEP to our 800m leg Daniel who is a freshman and did a good job filling in when our other 800 leg, Chris, went down in the prelims with an injury. The rest of the DMR was pretty crazy as the officials messed up and made the top 800 legs hand off at 600m. The race continued anyways and they decided to just give places and forget about times. In fact our mile leg, Calum, ran 1800m to make the race an even 4km. That part of the race was crazy because no one new what was going to happen. The funniest part was when our coach yelled at Calum to run an extra lap and in the middle of the race he just shouts out “NO!!!”. Not only did he run the extra lap but he closed it in 30 because some guy he was lapping thought he was done too.

UTEP ended up winning and we took 2nd. It kinda sucks that the times didn’t count because we probably would have run mid 9:50s, which woulda made the UofH top 5 list.

Saturday:
This day didn’t go nearly as well as I thought it would, but no complaints. In the 800m final I made a stupid move and paid for it. I was sitting in 5th at the time and on the 3rd lap made too big of a move too quickly to move up to 2nd. In doing that I had to go too wide and then on the last lap, one of the runners held me to the outside on the curve and I got thrown around a little bit. Then coming into the last 100m, I was fried. My legs were dead and I had nothing left. I got passed at the line by 2 guys which I shouldn’t have let happen. Anyways, the legs just weren’t there today and the stupid move took too much out of me. I’m just not in shape or sharp enough to make those kinds of moves in the 800 yet.

Overall:
I’m very pleased with this weekend, especially friday. I felt extremely relaxed during both of those races. I just ran out of gas by Saturday. I’m not in shape yet to be able to run 3 races. All things considered, it was a productive weekend. Less than 2 weeks ago I wasn’t even going to run indoors at all and hadn’t done a single workout where I was straining at all, let alone a heavy “anaerobic” workout to get used to racing. So that being said, I’m very pleased. I think this will give me a good place to build on towards outdoors, which is the main goal. I hate doing this, but looking back through the logs this is the best 8/12 double I’ve run indoors (1:54, 3:05 frosh year, 1:55.85-3:04 soph year compared to 1:54-2:59 this year), and I’d done it at least once each year I was at rice, and there I had already had 6 weeks+ of workouts like 10×400 in 60 w/1min rest, while this year I haven’t even really started my slower distance workouts at 2mi-5k pace yet. Anyways, it felt good to get out there and compete again and this time thoroughly enjoying it.

Awesome racing/competing by all the UofH guys to capture the Conference Championship! As far as distance guys go, Daniel and Calum both PR’d in the mile, running 4:17 and 4:10 respectively.

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