The three days of the State meet left me exhausted, emotionally, mentally and even physically but I didn’t even run a step on two of those days. It was a binge watching of competitive track that I loved, but it impacted me significantly in a variety of ways. In some ways, not unlike a hard race.
This ride all starts well before the State meet. The path that each kid takes, be the kid who is just starting to run, or the kid trying to break 8 for the mile, or the kid trying to be a state champion, is its own epic amazing story. For some of these kids, it has been an on-going journey for four years.
There are kids who are “all in" and the kids that are doing this to prepare for another sport. There are kids who are incredibly talented versus those that are less so. There are desires and goals, different backgrounds, different stories of how their day went, and whatever else they are dealing with. Each is an amazing story.
It is an amazing privilege to not only have a front row seat to there story, but to be in some part on that roller coaster of ups and downs with them. I am not just reading or watching the story, I am in it.
They are thrilling and heartbreaking. They are exhilarating and exhausting. The sharing of the training runs, the workouts, and the races with these young athletes is just as profound and incredible as my own running was and has been to me. And these days, it is even more.
I like the story of the kid who won his last two 1600m races by a combined .4 seconds.
ReplyDeleteYeah that is a good story, but it is even better that it was a combined 0.04 seconds. 4/100ths. Crazy. Add to that he should have won the Arcadia two mile as the kid who beat him by 1/100th clearly went inside the track. And add to that this is the kid who scored the game winning goal in the state soccer championship and was selected as CO HS soccer player of the year. It is a ridiculous story.
Delete