This was a fun day and a complete estimate on the overall mileage.
We headed up to Brookings South Dakota for the first ever Jim Emmerich/Alumni Invitational in the brand new Indoor track facility at South Dakota State. When I was at school we were DII and now they are a full fledged DI program with the facilities to support that program! It was an amazing facility to walk into comparied to the old indoor facility we practiced at back in the early 2000's. The meet hosted 8 teams, the alumni mile and 4x300meter relay and a Little Jackrabbit 60 meter dash. The alumni mile was the 4th event following the Little Jackrabbit 60m dash that both of my boys participated in and ran great! I followed the 2.5 year old down the track and there was a great crowd of approximately 400 people watching not counting the athletes. The LEMIRE Boys represented well and had a blast.
Alumni Mile was quite the field with 24 alumni toein the line ranging from just out of college to 50 years old. Majority of the field was 30-34 years old with a handfull of 24-27 year olds and some 40 year olds that still have wheels. This field held one Olympian the SDSU Mile record holder and multiple DII All-Americans. I knew the race would go out fast and it being a 300 meter track the race is 5.33 laps around the track. The first 100m I went out in 18 seconds and was 10 meters behind majority of the field. That was an oh shit moment and I thought what did I get myself into! I felt stronger and thankfully my strategy was opposite of most and I continued at my pace and passed people on every lap. I was about halfway around the track when the leaders hit the bell lap started and I pick it up even more because I didn' want to get lapped. I passed one of the older guys with 300 to go and then was gaining on a kid 7 years younger than me. As I hit his shoulder and I was pushing it to try and pass him with a little authority he layed down a 150meter kick that dropped me like I was standing still. DAMN 26 year old YOUNG LEGS!! I finished strong gaining on people with every lap and if this was a 3,000 meter race I think I would have finished pretty high up there but I still managed 13th out of 24 in a 5:21 mile. Not to shabby and most important is that I didn't get hurt in the firstrace of the day. Afterwards I felt as if I could have ran harder but I was definitely satisfied with that time.
Next up 4x300 meters with just under 2 hours of rest. Now this was interesting because it's been awhile since I put two hard efforts in like that in on the same day. The alumni group met up and divided up into 5 relay teams and some young guns that just graduated put together a team that completly dimolished the other 4 teams. I spent a good portion of this time running around the track with the guys catching up and cooling down from the mile. Then after about a half hour of that we sat around and caught up with everyone. Sitting there the hamstrings started to tighten up which was a little worry some. We then warmed up as a group again and got ready to try and run as fast as possible. I ended up running a 47 second split of the relay which was not the slowest on my team but was not the fastest either. It was definietly funny to see all of these old guys running around this brand new track facilityand fun to see the young guns benefiting from the dollars donated to SDSU by Alumni. This facilty was constructed in most part by Alumni donations and yes I donated money for it and am proud to have done so and make SDSU a better place to run and attend school!
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