Four Raptors and four P.R.'s at Acorn Relays

Post date: Nov 21, 2012 7:01:17 AM

April 2011

Now that news is in about Taylor's performance we can simplify things and call it four P.R.s! Taylor jumped an excellent 13' 4" in the long jump and since he has never jumped in competition before that's certainly a P.R. Good work, Taylor! Unfortunately I have no pictures of his jumps since I was filming him with Annabel's Flip video camera on his jumps. But soon we will have video!

Before the start. We all know Annabel! That's Andrea on the right.

The 1500 was the first race of the day and Annabel had come to the meet expressly to run it. Andrea on the other hand jumped in at the last minute with the attitude of "What the heck, I'll try it." It was a fast race! Both Annabel and Andrea were working. At the end though both were happy! Annabel ran a 5:36, which translates to a 5:55 mile and Andrea (who is a 6th grader) ran a 6:15 which equates to a 6:34 mile.

The gun goes off. Andrea is also an excellent sprinter. Can you tell?

In the year or so since the club had run in one of these meets I'd forgotten how long they take! Two hours in from the start time they were barely finished with the second event! And the 100 meters, as it always does, took forever. It all took so long that I recommended that everyone go home and come back to fight another day! In the future I think we adopt a "cell phone" strategy and call people at home when their race is like an hour away from happening to avoid people sitting around literally for hours. Zach and Jena had a good strategy themselves. They left and did errands, came back much later and still waited like 45 minutes!

Zach at the start. That's former MLK XC coach Brooks Geiken in red shirt.

But that wait was well worth it. Armed with his brand-new XC shoes, Zach ran an absolutely great race (not only fast but really smart) and P.R.ed by a whopping twelve seconds in the 800! Zack was going so fast that on his first lap he beat his 400 meter P.R. !

Zach on the final straight. He probably would have gone even faster but the girl ahead of him here just died and he was boxed in with nowhere to go.

He would have been happy to break three minutes but slaughtered that goal with a 2:48 (the official time was 2:48.3 and my watch said 2:47.8 so let's split the difference)! Last I saw Zach's family they were headed off to Top Dog to get Zach some well-deserved chow! Considering a significant number of Raptors were either sick, busy or out of town it was great showing!