After close to 20 years of coaching track, it's not often that I get totally blown away by a surprise performance. Vess likes to call me a "bitter, cynical old man." And while I dispute such a label, there is some truth to it. I tend not to get nearly as worked up -- positively or negatively -- as I probably did in my younger days. Not that I'm that old.
Anyway. Saturday was one of those relatively rare moments of out-of-the-blue surprise, at the Metropolitan Championship at Ramapo College's beautiful track facility in nearby Mahwah, NJ. The first event was the 10,000 meters. As always, we loaded it up with the maximum of five men -- four of them freshmen!
The US Junior standard in the 10km is 32:45. Of the freshmen entered, two of them (Sean Nestor, Joel Moss) were "too old" in terms of their birthdates to qualify (you cannot turn 20 in the year of the championship). The other two -- Mike Nicoletti, Mike Keegan (aka Meegan) -- were of age. So to speak. I felt all of them had an outside chance at the 32:45 standard, but it was by no means guaranteed and in some cases it would have to be classified as a long shot at best.
Nicoletti ran the race of his life. He placed second overall in 32:35.61 and now joins Quimes and Jackie Gamboli as Junior National qualifiers. Here are the many reasons this was an utterly shocking performance.
-- The usual "formula" for calculating 5km times to projected 10km performances is taking the 5km time, doubling it and adding a minute. Nicoletti's PR is 16:0something, as he likes to say. Let's say it's 16:07 (I'm too lazy to look it up right now, OK?). Follow that formula and that means 33:14 is what he should run. Obviously, he did a lot better than that.
-- His 5km SPLIT was 16:15, just slightly slower than his 5km PR! He did not slow down much in the second half, running 16:20. This does not happen frequently.
-- Three weeks ago at Monmouth, he ran his first 10km and did 33:21 (pretty close to the above formula) and ran really well. You don't often get or expect to see 36-second jump in performance in that short a timeframe.
-- For the past two weeks or so, he has been bothered by a stiff and sore back. It has hampered his training. In fact, his workout at Vassar on Tuesday was not pretty -- "one of my worst ever," he surmised. I was there. I would have to agree with his gloomy assessment.
-- Going into the race, he was his usual worrisome self, telling Birthday Boy Posch that he would be lucky to finish the race and how lousy he was feeling. Blah. Blah. Blah.
Truthfully, in my mind I had him pegged for our fourth finisher in Saturday's race ... based on all the above factors.
Again, it's not often you get these sort of surprises.
So now, our trip to Iowa gets a little longer in terms of days and in terms of laps.
No complaining from this cynical, bitter old man.
Complete results and splits from today's meet to follow soon ...
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