ACSIS Cross-Country Champioships

So I have been talking a lot about future and stuff... and not enough about present things. I probably just have not been talking enough in general. I am not big on "small talk" so this is difficult, but I like to write so I will try harder. Okay?

Well anyways, I was invited by a coach at ISS to run the cross-country meet at SAS on Friday. To tell the truth I was not all that excited. Before the race I remember wishing I was running a 100 miler rather than a 3.1 miler. Going into Friday I thought that it just might be the hardest, most grueling, fastest race I have ever run. Fast, hard, and especially grueling runs are not cool to me. I think it is more of an accomplishment to run as far as your body will take you rather than as fast. Put me on a road and say "run straight for as long as you can" and that would suffice. I just hope to never become ann Anton Krupika, where I probably don't eat enough, run 200 miles a week, and have no time for friends and stuff. I have to say that that man is just insane though. I do hope to be able to run as consistent as he does, but not as far and fast.

But anyways, I warmed up really well and felt great! I ran a few sprints and stretched probably 4 times. Me and dad have this routine stretch that we always do before a run and it takes like 10 minutes, so four of those will tell you how much I stretched. I drank tons of water the last two days or so and ate pasta for dinner the night before made by my mother. (It was good too :) ) You might think that is a little extravagant for just a 5k, but I was really really nervous. But for some reason when I line up on the starting line, those nerves completely disappear. I don't know why but they do. The race director blew the horn to start and off we went.

Because of my background in running, which is not a lot but much more than probably every kid there, I knew how to run a race. I started off slow, not going for show like everyone else did. I paced myself at the beginning, so much so that I thought after the finish that I could have run it faster from the start. Right at about 2k people started to get the idea in their head saying," Wow I started off too fast." About 3k I made my way to the second pack of kids, because their were, in fact, some incredibly fast kids there. About 4k the pack finally spread out to where I had no more people to draft off of and so I sped up a lot. I kept my teammate in sight the last kilometer and with about 1k to go, I caught up with him and said,"Dude let's go!" We started almost at a sprint until we hit the track. We caught up with and passed about 5 people in the process, and one guy stuck with us.

Then something happened that seems to happen every race I run. The last stretch of the race seems to be a "non-memorable" time where is does not matter how hard or bad I hurt, I pick up the pace and hit full-throttle. It's weird though because that last section of the race you already don't have breath but something hits you and when you start sprinting, you basically just stop breathing. I don't know if I am the only one that does that, but... Well I passed up my teammate and the dude that couldn't be shaken and hit the finish like in somewhere around 21 minutes. My previous 5k record was just under 23 so I definitely PR'd. I was happy and so was my teammate, Aurthur. Afterward, some SAS people through an ice-cold towel or my head and gave me a freezing cold 100 Plus to drink and I felt good. I finished 23rd out of something like 100 people and Aurthur finished 24th, seconds behind me.

I am pretty proud of what I ran, but I still hate 5k's, and I always will. haha