Checking in with my Nationals update. To no one's surprise, it was miserably hot and humid in Baton Rouge. Fortunately, there was a 200m indoor "warm-up" (more like cool off) track next to the outdoor facility. Here are my observations in a nutshell:
Pros: Warm-up track, nice clerk of course officials, laps splits, Cajun food
Cons: WEATHER, incompetent officials on the track, no podium.
My team won the championship in a landslide so I guess I can't complain about the outcome of the meet but there are things USATF needs to improve before this even reaches the level of a good high school track meet. For example:
Officials miscounted laps in the woman's 5000m, pulled an 80+ runner off the track telling her she was finished and then later disqualified her for not running the full race!
The digital clock on the track mysteriously ran too slowly for the men's 5,000 - the clock showed 13:13 after they had run 12.5 laps- so the guys ran an extra lap thinking they hadn't finished.
Officials decided to move the meet indoors due to storms so they could complete the 200 prelims and 4x800 in time to get to the USATF Banquet (why couldn't they move the events to the next day?). Oops - there goes that OUTDOOR 4x800 AR my team was trying to set. Guess we'll have to go for it again when we're even older...
Officials telling spectators it was against the rules to count laps from the stands for the 10,000m runners (given the experience in the 5,000 no one wanted to take chances). The two runners in front of me in the race were pulled off the track by officials but broke free and ran the correct number of laps.
Women runners in the steeplechase (me) prevented by officials from using the first water barrier for some unknown reason. Oops....good thing no one was racing for a record there.
The heat and humidity were awful. Since I was running 6 events, I decided to bag the 5,000 and 10,000 and go for a win in the steeple and the AR in the relay. I got the win in the steeple with a 40 second PR so I'm excited about that but I'm really disappointed that we couldn't even try to get the relay record. So I came home with 3 golds (steeple, 4x800indoor, 4x400) and 3 fourths (10,000, 5,000, and 800).
For those of you who are Kevin Castille watchers, you might be interested in knowing he blasted the field in the 10,000m for about half the race and then walked off the track for a DNF. Pretty strange and, given his performance at Peachtree, doesn't engender a lot of trust.