ECAC Championships
Boston University
Saturday, March 7,
2015
5,000-meter run
4. Michelle Gaye 16:41.89 *school record, All-ECAC, highest
point scorer in school history
37, 77 (40), 1:57 (40), 2:36 (39), 3:17 (41)
3:57 (40), 4:37 (40), 5:16 (39), 5:57 (41), 6:37 (40)
7:18 (41), 7:59 (41), 8:40 (41), 9:21 (41), 10:02 (41)
10:42 (40), 11:23 (41), 12:02 (39), 12:42 (40), 13:22 (40)
14:02 (40), 14:43 (41), 16:02 (39), 16:41.89 (39.89)
Kilometer splits:
3:17, 3:20, 3:25, 3:20, 3:19
The race went out hard. Really hard. Through the first kilometer, Michelle was in the back pack (there was a lead pack and the back pack, and there was a chasm between both) and was hanging on for dear life at a very fast pace. She was battling and running in lane 2 much of the time.
Once she broke clear of that pack, she began to make up ground on the lead group, which was starting to splinter. Each athlete that she caught and overtook, she did so with decisive moves. She ran her usual, methodical pace. And while the closing kilometer splits look simply steady, they were BOLD and DECISIVE laps in which she was hard-charging about as fast as anyone in the race. As Coach Chuck said afterwards, if the race were 6km she might have won!
Where does this race stack up there in the lore of the distance running program? Oh, it's up there, baby. Probably the finest single performance by a women's distance runner. And definitely in the pantheon of Vess/Griffin/Segni/DelaCruz of recent memory. Put it this way: To break 17 for the first time, and do it by 20 seconds? Words in a simple blog post won't due it justice, so we'll just let it stand alone in its amazing greatness.
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