This time of year, as one meet bleeds into the next, we don’t
spend a lot of time at home. Invariably, we often get questioned from our
family members, who are used to our being gone for long stretches of time, “so,
how did the meet go?” And almost always, the answer is “eh, it was a mixed bag.”
Such is the nature of track and field, an individual and team sport wrapped
into one. A few subpar performances are thrown into the same weekend as
breakthrough efforts that smash records or qualifying marks or earn medals and
T-shirts.
Colonial Relays is our longest trip of the year, and one of
our favorite meets. As such, our hope and expectation is for more good than
bad, given the time and energy invested into the trip. We also generally bank
on some great southern weather, and we did get some of that – as well as a lot
of pollen, a lot of wind, and then a lot of rain mixed in with both; so, even
the weather was a mixed bag (as it usually is in the spring). The mixed bag
this year at Colonial was compounded by the fact that this was the first
outdoor meet for most of our athletes.
Coaches and athletes like to use the term “rust buster” when
referring to the first meet, but Colonial is a long way to drive to “bust the
rust.” And, if your event is something like the 10,000 meters, you better get
it right quickly as it’s not something you can do every week (fortunately,
those guys figured it out pretty well). Also! With Easter so early this year,
very few athletes were able to shake off that rust at Monmouth as per usual.
So, there was a fair amount of that this year at Colonial. But despite that,
there were also a fairly large number of personal-best times and relay splits,
which is encouraging for April 1 and April 2.
As coaches and athletes, though, we have to move on and plan for the next one, which this time of year is usually just a few days away.
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