3…2…1… THREE MEETS, TWO YEARS, ONE WEEK!
Happy New Year! It has been a couple of weeks since my last post. The holidays have been busy and fulfilling with a healthy mix of friends, family, food, and fast running! We just wrapped up our Sprinticity winter open track sessions. Thanks to everyone that made it out to share the track with us.
I want to point you all in the direction of our YouTube channel. I’ve been trying to bring more attention and visibility to the incredible athletes in Vermont Track & Field. I wish I could feature every single performance in every single event, at every meet. Unfortunately, I can’t be in two places at once, and only have one device for recording, but I’m hoping to get a few others to help in the future to increase our coverage! Please consider subscribing to our channel. It helps us to produce future content.
With that said, I’ve uploaded over 150 videos from the past three meets at UVM. Here are the playlists from the last two meets:
1) VITA Meet #3
2) VITA Meet #4
Here are a few of the videos for you to preview:
Three Thoughts
1) Beasts of the East – It was great to finally see some of the talent from eastern Vermont teams such as Oxbow, Hartford, Thetford, and St. Johnsbury in action. In particular, athletes from St. Johnsbury have put up some really impressive performances in early season meets. Some of us get excited by numbers (guilty), but it is waaayyyy better to see athletes competing in-person rather than reading results on a website. I’m certainly biased in my coverage and knowledge of western Vermont athletes that are at UVM each week, but I’m never surprised by the consistent excellence cultivated by Coach Langmaid and his staff. One athlete deserves a special highlight. Dillon Ryan (St. Johnsbury) threw 61’5.75″ in the weight throw (25lbs) over the weekend at VITA Throws #2, a performance that ranks him 17th in the United States (as of 1/10/19). No one else in the competition threw over 50′, two other athletes were in the 40’+ range, and the bottom three performances combined would be short of Dillon’s throw.
2) Timing the untimed – I think an interesting experiment would be to quantitatively measure the amount of idle time at track meets. I constantly hear complaints from athletes, parents, coaches, officials, affiliates, second uncles, household pets, Reddit… okay, I’m getting carried away here. My point is, the meets are certainly not perfect and can be improved by being more efficient, but the responsibility is on everyone, not just any single party. There is a lot of waiting time between events on the track, and attempts in some of the field events. I believe in data driven decision-making. Let’s see where we are losing the most time, and then we can collectively address the issues and come up with a solution.
3) Breaking news! – The featured photo is the break line in the 4x200m relay. It’s a beautiful thing – runners race to that line and then cut to the inside lane. It’s even better when everyone runs the same distance before reaching that line… but that didn’t happen earlier this season. When watching the relays back in December, I noticed that the 1st leg runners were instructed to stay in their lanes, and the 2nd leg had the responsibility of cutting in. The yellow start lines at UVM are used for the 4x400m relay and it is set up for a two-turn stagger. This means that the first leg in the 4x200m should have been cutting in at the break. Many of the 4x200m times were faster this weekend since the teams in lanes 2 and 3 got to run a shorter (and correct) distance compared to a month ago. For teams that drew lane 1, this doesn’t apply… and sorry you got stuck in lane 1. I’m taking credit for this one with a clickbait headline – “Breaking News – Sprinticity can make you faster without evening training!”
The not-so-sexy, non-clickbait truth to getting faster is that it does take good training and recovery. What are you waiting for? 3…2…1…
Stay fast,
Kevin