We had the USATF MN Association Open and Masters meet this past weekend up in the Twin Cities. It seems like it is early in the track season to hold the State Championship meet, but the always run it the day after the Minnesota High School Track and Field Championships at the same venue. They also run a regional meet called the Mid-America Open.
The way it works is that if you are from Minnesota you are competing in both meets. If you are not, you are running in the Mid-America meet. The Minnesota meet is broken up into age groups, so the open division is 19-29 and Masters is five-year increments after that. My current age group is 35-39. So it's possible for a Minnesota resident to place twice in one event. For example, I placed first in my age group in the 400 Meters for Minnesota and third in the Mid-America Region Open. They used to have different age categories for the Regional meet, which meant that for age groups like mine without a lot of participation, I would come home with a lot of medals. I like this way of doing it better because it adds more value to being able to place in the Region.
As far as my times from this past weekend, I was pretty happy with my performances. Based on the weather conditions at the meet, my limited training so far this year, and my times I was hitting in practice, I was expecting to hit about 54 seconds in the 400 meters. I ended up running 53.28 which is quite a bit faster than I ran last year at this time. It at least gives me a small amount of hope that I might be able to get under the All-American Standard time of 52.5 seconds. With my shortened season I only have one more chance to hit that this year at the end of this month. And you never know what the weather will be like on that day.
Speaking of weather, we had some pretty rainy conditions this past weekend. It was pretty cool and was sprinkling a little bit for the 400 meters, which wasn't too bad. There was a pretty strong wind on the home stretch, but it wasn't terrible. By the time we got to our 200 meter race it was raining pretty hard. They were having some issues with the timing system so we were standing out in the rain for quite a while before our race. There's always a concern about staying warm and not straining any muscles when it gets colder out so the longer we were standing there, the more nervous I got. I went out a little tentative in the 200, but at the same time I really wanted to get to the finish line to get it done. I thought I ran a pretty good race considering the conditions.
Unfortunately, the timing system that they used for the meet had some issues with the rain and did not register the starting gun. They brought us all into a tent at the end of the meet and explained that they did not have our times. It was disappointing, but at the same time it probably doesn't really matter all that much. I don't think my 200 time would have been all that exceptional anyway. It would just be nice to know where I'm at even if the conditions were poor.
As I have mentioned a few times before, I am kind of a fairweather person when it comes to training outside on the track. I figure at my age it might as well be a nice day if I am going to run around outside. Otherwise I can just do my workouts in the comfort of my home. I might need to reconsider that a little bit and just go off of what my training schedule says I should do.
So with that, here is the quote for this post -
There is no such thing as bad weather, just soft people.
-Bill Bowerman
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