Today was the State Championships. I've fallen behind on my Running Blog so I will just resume here. Today I got out pretty strong, but since everybody at the state meet goes out really fast, that put me at like 40th place for the first 800. By the time I got to the mile, which I believe was 4:53 or so, I was in 25th. I started picking off people who still meant business pretty well at this point in the race. Unfortunately it had become fairly strung out up front due to Justin Janke ditching everyone while I was moving through the people who thought they were running the 1600. That meant I was always at the front of a group trying to reach somebody who was 10-20 yards in front of me. Thus, I spent a large portion of the race in no man's land with a small pack of 5 or so people feeding off of each other and moving up 10 yards behind me, but at the same rate as me. I hit 2 miles at like 10:02 and kept trying to get the pack 20 yards ahead of me, in which one straggler came in 15:44 but most were around 15:35-15:38. Unfortunately, the distance was too hard to make up. Central Kitsap's number 1 blew by me with 800 to go and kicked it in at 15:38. Not surprising given how fast he's run so far this season and given his 800m speed. Tom from Juanita and the Bainbridge kid both challenged me in the final stratch but I held them off and came in 15:46.0, matching my PR down to the tenth of a second. The straggler from the pack ahead of me was a Ballard kid who had not been a factor up front this season up to this point. Peter and the Ballard kid who beat me at Districts both ran strangely well and came in 3-4 with 15:20 and 15:25, which was really confusing mostly due to the Ballard guy. Garfield guy ran 15:39.5. I was the 5th district 2 finisher and 12th overall. It was a pretty good race relative to how I've run this season. However, I'm not very happy with where my season ended up but I guess I need to keep in mind that my mileage is still quite low and that I did not really have a Summer of training. I qualified for BorderClash, which is nice. Will came in near his PR with 15:59, Joseph ran a giant PR and ran 15:57. Our typical 7th runner, Dante, ran 16:37, also a sizable PR, but that's where the positives stop for Interlake. Raymond, who could probably run around 16:20, ran 16:36. Bryce got his leg stepped on or something and rolled his ankle, which prevented him from finishing. Matthew was feeling off and ran 16:38. We knew 4 teams were in competition for the win, and we got 4th out of those teams. If our 4 and 5 had been around 16:20, which is conservative for Matthew, we would have taken a close second to North Central. I still have BorderClash to run an impressive race and I also feel positive about the room I have to grow for track season.
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