Friday, April 15, 2011

Putting a wrap on California

We head home from California with a very early flight on Saturday -- wake-up at the hotel is before 5 a.m. local time. We will be traveling all day, arriving at JFK close to 6 p.m., if all goes well.

This trip was successful on many fronts.

First and foremost, our athletes gave it their all on the track and posted superb results.

This is a prestigious meet -- dubbed "Where the World's Best Athletes Compete" -- and we were honored to be part of it. Trust me when I say we will be back here at some point. It might not be next year or the year after, but we'll be back.

Mt. San Antonio College is located in a beautiful setting in the hills about 30 miles east of LA. On Friday afternoon, we all went for a run on the mountainous trails and roads surrounding Mt. SAC. It was desert-like: Sunny and hot, but very very dry ... quite a departure from our Northeast spring weather.

After showering up, we headed for a brief sightseeing tour of Hollywood and Beverly Hills. It was fun and unsettling at the same time ... a lot of sketchy characters out there. Here's my East Coast bias, but I feel much more at home (not to mention safe) on the streets of NYC.

Before I forget, my heart and mind were back East for our athletes competing at the the first day of the Met Championships at Rutgers. Thanks to Vess and Flint for helping out with coaching duties in our absence.

From what I could piece together from multiple texts, highlights included:

--A personal-best hammer throw from Sean Ellman.
--A strong showing by Addie DiFrancesco and a nice PR from Kelley Gould in the women's 5k.
--Very strong efforts from Mike Nicoletti and Mike Keegan in the 10k, both ran 32:14 and were in the top scoring spots.
--A solid PR in the 10k from Ryan Brown.

More details when I get home, get the results and the splits. Please forgive me if there is a bit of a delay in getting those up on the blog.

Thanks for the texts, calls and emails while we were out here. Looking forward to heading home ...

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