It's Now or Never!

Well, our district track championships start tomorrow with prelims and finals on Friday. The top eight in each event advance to the finals. In realistic terms, Greg's high school track career could end tomorrow. Competition will be keen to advance as a good number of runners are running quality 400 times. In fact, a number of last week's league championship meets saw 400 times as low as 48.39. This was a runner who then doubled in the 800 with a 1:54 and change! It seems like this is a bumper crop year for the 400. Guys running between low 50 and 51 are all over the place. Greg ran a personal open best last week in our league meet of 52.79. This is nowhere near fast enough to get to the finals for our district. Greg remains confident he can go into the 51's tomorrow and I think he's right but he'll have to run leaving nothing behind. It will likely take this level to advance to Friday's finals.

I still believe Greg has faster times in him but at this point, I think we're dealing with the space between his ears and not the speed in his legs. While I still believe we followed a strong training program, I was expecting some lower times than where we are at this point. Looking back at the year, I'm not sure what, if anything, I would have changed in the training. It's not likely that the guys could have achieved faster 200 or 400 interval times for a sustained workout. This is not to say I'm writing off what we did. For Hudson, this was the best pre-season workup we've ever had. The reality may just be that there are a lot of fast quarter milers out there and they have more speed to play with. Having said that, I'm still confident there's an opportunity to "go low" tomorrow and am looking for the best. If nothing else, it has been a great season.