Saturdays as of late

It is HS track season and so Saturdays as of late have been spent at a track oval with the team, cheering and coaching distance kids.

The day starts actually the night before with me prepping out some breakfast burritos – a large flour tortilla packed with egg, chorizo or Italian sausage, cheese, potato and pepper.  I also prep a large old school Thermos of coffee.  And then there is the packing of the bag of gear.  Colorado weather in March-April-May can be a t-shirt and shorts affair where you slather on sunscreen, a bone chilling wet and cold snow event or anything in between.  I pack an old Air Force duffle with a variety of options and usually some extra stuff as kids tend to have the wrong stuff when its cold.

I am usually up at 5 on Saturday morning as the bus to the meet is typically scheduled to head out around 6 or 6:30.  After the ride to the meet, it then pretty much chatting up the kids to assure they are ready for their event.  Track meets seem to never run exactly on time and so there is some educated guessing as to when a kid should start their warm up for the 1600 based on how many heats of the 100 and 110m hurdles there are. 

Other stuff comes up – the boys team shows up in different colored shorts for the 4 x 8 relay (that will get you DQ’d), spikes have to be changed and end up stripped out in the shoe, the 3 heats of the 3200 get combined into one, etc.  Then it is down onto the infield (when they allow that) to go back and forth to dial a kid in during their race, call splits, motivate them, etc.  A countless number of little things to manage the day …

I love it.  It is an all day affair where I end up not running, not taking care of myself with hydration, and I’m on my feet all day.  It is tiring but it is that kind of thing where at the end of the day I feel good even though I am knackered. 

This weekend’s track event was all that and more.  Four of our distance kids made the trip with the head coach to the prestigious Arcadia Invitational.  We had a squad of state meet contending athletes over at the loaded Mullen Invitational.  And then we had a good contingent of kids at the Caviness meet at Hinkley High School.  With three meets going on at the same time, the back channel chatter of text messaging was high.  And when I got home at six from the Caviness meet, it was then tuning into the Arcadia livestream to watch that and to see how those kids were doing while updating the results from the day into the roster database.

So I basically did track all day.  I really enjoy this but there is a bit of guilt in recognizing how much time I spend on something I enjoy so much (when I could be accomplishing other things in that time if I geared it back a bit).  But these are my Saturdays for now.