My Race with an Olympic Gold Medalist

I wanted to get one more 400 meter race in during the indoor season. I was planning on that being the MN Indoor Masters Championships in a couple of weeks. That meet ends up being pretty long because it is an all-ages meet attended by a number of high school athletes. I haven't been happy with my indoor 400 meter times so far this year and wanted to make some adjustments to see if I could bring my time down.

We had a ski trip planned for this weekend that ended up changing just a bit. Instead of staying at a hotel near the ski area, we stayed at a relative's house about an hour away. We did get some skiing in, but just on Saturday, which gave me a chance to go to the final indoor Charities Challenge track meet for this season. The meet was up in the Twin Cities and was on our way home so it seemed to work out well. For what seems like a sidenote, we decided to bring the old pocket camera instead of the SLR because we would be skiing and didn't need a nice camera. We also wouldn't need to take many photos at the track meet. As you can see below, the lesson is now to always bring the nice camera.

I signed up for the 200 and 400 meter races and my 8 year-old son was going to run the 60 and 200. As I was going to get changed I saw a familiar face and had to do a double-take. Olympic Gold Medalist Andrew Rock was walking in as I was going out. Rock was a part of the 4x400 meter relay team at the 2004 Athens Olympics. He was also a silver medalist in the 2005 World Track & Field Championships in the open 400 meters (coming in second to Jeremy Wariner) and World Champion in the 2005 4x400 relay. He attended the University of Wisconsin - La Crosse so he is kind of a local celebrity in the La Crosse area.

I assumed he was going to run the 400 meters and there was a good chance that we might end up in the same heat based on who else was there. Now, there's a good side and a bad side to getting to run against a world-class athlete. The good side is that you get to say you ran against a world-class athlete. The bad part for someone like me is that I am going to get beat really bad. That's pretty much what happened. I found myself during the race almost wishing I could just watch him run. He was finishing as I was coming down the home stretch, so any dream of saying that I hung in there with an Olympic Gold Medalist would be a pretty big exaggeration.

It was a moment that I will remember for a long time and I'm glad I was there. It was good to get a chance to talk to someone who's career I have followed for years. My son got to meet an Olympic Gold Medalist and I did improve my time a bit over my last meet. All in all it was a pretty good day. Hopefully I will get to see more of Andrew Rock at meets in the future.