Qualified for Conference

On Saturday, I ran at the Brutus Hamilton Invitational at UC Berkeley. In high school, at the end of each season, I competed at Cal for the league finals called the Meet of Champions, and Cal has never let me down. Every year for four years, I would get a personal record in every event that I ran, so I was ready to run a good time at this meet – well, almost. Now running for Davis, it’s been a while since I’ve actually ran in a real invitational, so I was surprised at my time in the 100 hurdles – a 15.08. I was so excited to run close to a sub-15 time, that I completely forgot about my other race, the open 100 that was right after the hurdles. I was not used to having back-to-back races, and I think my mind was on the time that I got in the 100 hurdles.

 

The time of 15.08 makes me eligible to run in the Big West Conference meet on May 15 at UC Irvine. The “qualifying time for the 100 hurdles is 15.2” (bigwest.org), so I’m excited that I qualified – but my personal record is actually 14.69 – and that’s from high school. I have not been able to run a sub-15 since running for Davis, and it’s really frustrating because I feel that I have gotten faster since high school. I can’t decide my actual emotion for getting the 15.08 because although it’s my personal record for the season and for being on a college team, and it qualifies me to go to conference, I know that I can do better and get closer to my overall personal record.

 

But I’m not in the clear yet; my time of 15.08 only qualifies me to race – now I have to be one of 32 people from the track team that actually gets to go to the meet. The team can only afford a certain number of athletes to fly down to Irvine, so we’ll have to see what the coaches decide…