I am definately a week late in updating my blog with a recap of last Saturday's Penn Relays. Each time I thought about writing this over the past week something else entered my mind. Here is my list of 5 reasons it took me 9 days to write a blog:

1. I got back from my trip and had almost no food in my house so I spent the time trying to create new foods by combining whatever I had left. A few of those meal creations included tuna tacos, pancakes and rice, nesquick-flavored pancakes, and instant potatoes and toast. Eventually I did go to the store and am back eating normal and healthy now. i may keep the nesquick pancakes.

2. It has been raining non-stop in Eugene since my return so I've been unmotivated to do anything but watch B-Movies on free On-Demand. I was really surprised about how many of those movies Dennis Quaid is in!

3. After a great run at Penn I got so motivated to continue training that I've been sleeping in the weight room so that I can get to work sooner in the morning and don't waste time getting ready in the morning and driving to the weight room. I did find that neither the plates or the med balls make good pillows. I ended up putting two padded benches together for a bed. It has paid off though. I am now dead lifting 300 lbs in 2 sets of 5.

4. I volunteered at a local soup kitchen last week for 40 hours to fill a community service order from a jaywalking ticket crossing the street to the courthouse to go to jury duty. Pretty ironic huh? I made a few friends though. Jay is a war vet and has had a hard time with alcoholism for the past 30 years. He is really smart and I like discussing the economy with him. I invited him over for pancakes and rice but he passed for some reason...

5. I spent over an hour every night on the phone with one of my friends explaining what a DMR was and why it looked like I was jogging around the track not catching up to Khadevis Robinson and Gary Reed. My friend couldn't grasp the concept that I ran an event that wasn't in the Olympics or the fact that since I'm bigger than all the other 800m runners, why I couldn't catch all of them like Usain Bolt can. It was very hard to try to explain why running relaxed works in a distance race to run your best time. Even after almost 8 hours of conversation I'm not very positive that I got the point across, and I have a feeling that I'll get the same questions again after my next race.

So there are my reasons for postponing this blog until tonight. Now I'll give you the recap of my Penn Relays experience.

This was my first time competing for Team USA. That in itself made it a very special experience and hope there will be many more of those times over the next several years. The travel to Philadelphia went really well after my one-hour delay out of Eugene was cancelled. That was the first time I've ever had a flight go from a delay to on-time.

Friday, the day before the race, I picked up my Team USA gear kit at the hotel and discovered that they had mistakenly given my the little distance running shorts instead of my requested half tights. There was a team meeting that night to go over teams and logistics so I took my shorts to exchange them after the meeting. During the meeting I found out that I would be on the USA White team with Christian Smith (1200), Kelliw Willie (400), and Lopez Lomong (mile) - a pretty darn good team. After the meeting we rummaged through the uniform boxes to discover there were no half tights. There are also only red and blue colored speed suits so I was stuck with the little distance shorts. Even though I run the 800, I definitely do not have a distance runner's body. To say the least, I was not very excited about going out in front of 40,000 people in my short shorts. I took that night to just relax and the next morning I decided to man up and accept my short shorts and just go out there and do my thing.

Being part of the USA vs the World part of the Penn Relays gives you some VIP treatment. One of those is you get to warm up on the infield. That was especially cool since I was in the middle of my warmup when they ran the boys high school 4x100 championship race where a team from Jamaica ran 39.91 and the crowd just went crazy, especially the 15,000+ Jamaicans in the crowd. The warm up went well and I was pretty relaxed for the race until I got onto the track. I watched the first lap of the 1200 and started to feel myself get a little nervous. So I stopped watching the race until I was on the line and saw Kelly Willie about 50 meters away. By that time I was in my race zone and was anything but nervous.

I got the baton in 3rd place about 10-12 meters back from USA Blue and Canada. I take off with the intention of maintaining the gap to the two 1:43 800m runners in front of me. About 200m into the race the Kenyan runner moves in front of me. That gave me someone to pace off of and so I kept on his heels until about 200m to go and tried to put the hammer down. I passed him back on the turn and gave it all I had the last 75 meters. By the time I got to Lomong, I could barely lift my arm to give him the baton. That thing felt like it weighed 40 pounds. At that point I moved off the track and tried to find some water and recover a little bit. I looked up with two laps to go to see Lomong in the lead. I thought that would give us a chance at the very least so I was happy I had kept it close enough. The Canadian and Kenyan anchors rand around 3:51 miles and was just a little too much for Lomong but he still split around a 3:54 and we finished 3rd, beating the other USA Blue team.

After the race I cooled down and had to go straight to the airport to catch a flight back home. At the airport I talked to my coach over the phone and he told me that I had split 1:45.79. That time is .3 faster than my personal best. So to run that fast in April is a great sign that Coach Rowland and I are on the right track. I am still in a pretty tough training phase now so when I start to taper in June I don't think I'll be so surprised when I'm running even faster but for this early in the season, that is great.

Of course I was super pumped and told a bunch of people but in reality it doesn't mean much in the scheme of the season. There will be many other times when I'll need to run at least that fast. If I'm not running fast in June, July, and August then this race won't matter at all. But it does give me a big confidence boost right now and I feel like I should be able to go out and run at least in the 1:46's my next race out.

Here are some things you might find interesting from my Penn Relays weekend:

Race VIDEO of my 800m leg

Results

PL	Affiliation	Mark	Athletes	ID
1	Kenya	9:22.04	Frederick Musyoki Ndunge (2:57.53), Thomas Musembi (46.10), Jackson Kivuna (1:45.62), Josephat Kithii (3:52.79)	KEN
2	Canada	9:22.05	Matthew Lincoln (2:56.64), Tyler Christopher (45.34), Gary Reed (1:45.73), Nate Brannen (3:54.34)	CAN
3	USA White	9:23.65	Christian Smith (2:57.51), Kelly Willie (45.84), Matt Scherer (1:45.79), Lopez Lomong (3:54.51)	USA-w
4	USA Blue	9:24.43	Leo Manzano (2:57.40), Xavier Carter (44.94), Khadevis Robinson (1:44.04), Evan Jager (3:58.05)	USA-b
5	Australia	9:36.64	Craig Huffer (2:58.39), John Steffensen (45.20), Nick Bromley (1:49.12), Ryan Gregson (4:03.93)	AUS
6	France	9:50.66	Jamel Aarass (2:58.73), Bruno Naprix (46.89), Driss Yousif (1:55.43), Nouredine Smail (4:09.61)	FRA

Photos