This entry today is more of a reflection from all my hard work that I have talked about in my past blogs. Yesterday was the my last indoor meet for the season before outdoor and I noticed a huge payoff yesterday. Coach put me in the mile. We were at Anderson University for the Fred Wilt Memorial Invitational. I have always been decent at the mile, but has never been my favorite race. I love the two mile more because i can run just fast enough the entire two miles, but not too fast. The mile is a ridiculously fast race and it takes a lot of guts to run it. In high school it felt like i was stuck at 4:44 and was never going to go faster, but i put in over 400 miles in over the summer and coaches workouts in cross country and track really helped me achieve what happened yesterday.
I headed out into the cold weather for my 2 mile warm up. It was a pretty big meet, but i wasn't nervous because i've been to my fair share of big meets and it is what i train for. I knew i would do decent, but i didn't think i was going to do anything special. I knew the record was 4:33 and i wanted to go for it. I had just ran a 4:35 mile split two weeks ago at all-ohio for the Distance Medley Relay (which is 1200, 400, 800 , 1600). I was in the third and fastest heat of the mile. When the gun went off I started off in second and as people started passing me I noticed i was in 6th place, but wasn't slowing up. They were speeding up. With four more laps i decided to go around the pack and push the pace. I don't know where it came from, but i had a lot of energy and felt good. I had some internal conflict. My mind was saying, "What are you doing these guys are fast." But my body said, "you're and animal... you feel great.... go for it all." When the last lap came around i went into a full sprint. I only got pasted by one guy so i received second in my heat with a 4:27.
I was shocked, that was a personal record by 15 seconds in an open mile (not the distance medly relay) and picked up my fourth record at defiance by 6 seconds. The best part about it was looking at the finals sheet seeing that the top 5 runners, not including me, were all seniors. So that was a great feeling knowing that all my hard work at practice and on workouts payed off.
Picture: http://www.defianceathletics.com/mtrackfield/photos/147/2328/