USA Track and Field Masters Recap

It was a pretty good weekend at the USATF Outdoor Masters Championships. There were a lot of great performances and many great people to meet and talk to. It's an interesting group. It takes a very dedicated person to compete at this level. There is a definite time commitment. Not only did many people have to take almost a week off to travel to the meet and back home again. There are the registration fees, hotel, and travel expenses. And then just the time that it takes to train to compete at a national event like this. We have some pretty understanding families who also have to put up with our schedules and time away from home.

The weather at the meet was not ideal. It was in the mid-90s for most of the days. I believe it was in the 80s for the final day, but it sure didn't seem all that much cooler. I didn't end up having to run a preliminary race for the 200 meters on Saturday, but I still had to show up and declare. Then we waited to see if we would have enough for a prelim. The timing was such that I needed to do my warmup just in case we were going to run. We had eight runners in our age group declare so we rolled over to the final the next day. It would have been nice to just take the day off to go into Chicago, but that's the way it goes.

For the 200 finals I wanted to try to get under 24 seconds. I haven't run a lot of 200s since high school so I don't really know the last time I was under 24 seconds. I knew from my indoor time and my practice times that it was possible. My fastest time in high school was 23.5 so it's hard to say that I could get close to that 20 years later. I was able to run a 23.86 which was good enough for 4th place. It's one place out from getting a medal, but honestly I was just happy with my time.

We also ran a 4 x 400, which gave us a shot at a gold medal. I ran with some great guys from Kentucky who raced in the 400 hurdles. I was born in Kentucky so we had a connection. We were fortunate to bring home gold medals for the relay in a time of 3:37.18. This was my first National Championship so I was happy that they asked me to join them. Great guys as well.

So overall these were my results for the meet:
400 meters - 52.67 - 3rd place
200 meters - 23.86 - 4th place
4x400 meters - 3:37.18 (didn't get splits) - 1st place