Official Julia Lucas Appreciation Thread!!!

You can tell by this thread who has been in contention for a win and who is a bitter mid packer. Trials or not it's the final for the national championship. sorry you don't have the balls to chase the dream. She mistimed her move. She knows it. I've completely blown up in a road 5k trying to out kick the leader with 200m to go because I wanted to win. Only the trials? She'd be lucky to make it out of the qualifying rounds. Go for it.

has been who never was wrote:

"I gave it away, it's on my shoulders."

No finegrpointing, no excuses, just pure class. A lesson for all of us regardless of her race tactics or failure to qualify.

Definitely, I think she picked up a few fans by the way she's handled this.

I was critical of her tactics....at first. Then I started thinking. Seven A standard girls were around her with a few laps to go. She made the move to beat them (which she did except for two). The fact that a B beat her is Monday morning quarterbacking. With her lack of a kick if the race goes to a kick she might have finished further back.....Having said that, I think going with 800 left would have been the best move. Hold your head up Julia!!!!!

That was incredibly painful to watch. She was going so slow at the end, I thought she popped her hamstring and it wouldn't matter anyway. So she's not injured? What could possibly have gone so wrong that she couldn't even run properly? She looked so incredibly awful, like that woman who had heatstroke in the Olympic marathon and was weaving all over the place. Painful. All she had to do was just run five more strides like a normal human to hold third.

The long run for home is fine. You just need to know that you can do 71s and get the job done. You don't need to drop a 68 that has you running a 40s+ last 200m

gwalkerruns wrote:

I was critical of her tactics....at first. Then I started thinking. Seven A standard girls were around her with a few laps to go. She made the move to beat them (which she did except for two). The fact that a B beat her is Monday morning quarterbacking. With her lack of a kick if the race goes to a kick she might have finished further back.....Having said that, I think going with 800 left would have been the best move. Hold your head up Julia!!!!!

gwalkerruns wrote:

I was critical of her tactics....at first. Then I started thinking. Seven A standard girls were around her with a few laps to go. She made the move to beat them (which she did except for two). The fact that a B beat her is Monday morning quarterbacking. With her lack of a kick if the race goes to a kick she might have finished further back.....Having said that, I think going with 800 left would have been the best move. Hold your head up Julia!!!!!

i already posted this. fleshman and MLB were never going to be factors and i'm pretty sure uhl wasn't taking the slot. that's 4 for 3 slots. it's not monday morning quarterbacking knowing that fact and running accordingly. dropping sub 70s at 3800 when the pace was slow enough to have eliminated all the Bs was just plain stupid. even she admits it so why can't you? she did have a classy interview afterward. i wouldn't have been able to hold it together like she did after going through what she just had gone through.

Saw her interview. What a lady! Admitted that she made a mistake. Bad mounthing her should be limited to those runners or coaches who have NEVER made a strategic mistake in a race.

rojo wrote:

I don't know what to say other than - my god, I feel for you.

You went for the win and it backfired but you forever have my respect.

I was really routing for Julia and was sorry to see her come up short. I also thought her post-race interview was phenomenal - she accepted full responsibility for her tactical error, was articulate and gracious.

I watched a flotrack interview with her before the final where she talked about wanting to do something "special" in the final because of all the friends and family she had in the crowd. I wonder if this wasn't the real reason she took such a miscalculated risk. Someone in her camp should have reminded her to keep her eye on the prize which, in this case, wasn't the win!

I haven't read all the posts in this thread yet but 1 page in and what the majority of you are saying sickens me. Sure she may have made a tactical mistake but what gives any of you on this message board the right to bash her and say you have no respect for her? Is it because she just bettered your 5k pr by 3 minutes??? She went for it and came up agonizingly short by racing how she perceived to have the best shot. To say she deserves getting her dreams dashed because she hit a PHYSICAL wall is ridiculous. I guess all you message board champs know exactly what it's like to compete in these high caliber meets (no your high school conference meet doesn't count).

Julia put it all out there in that race and you can NEVER fault someone for that. For all you message board haters that have the use of hindsight, please do us the rest of us a favor and crawl back into your holes.

Stop me if you know all this, but it's lactic acid buildup. At high speed, the muscles at work produce lactic acid at a rate faster than the body can flush away. The faster one runs, the faster the buildup. The lactic acid is what sometimes makes people throw up during or after a race - but mostly, after a while it causes the muscles to stop functioning. When you see a track athlete unable to run, they've run too hard for too long, and the legs are shutting down. If Julia had started her mile-long drive for the finish only 100 meters later, she would have been able to maintain her pace and would probably have finished third and been on the Olympic team. It was the wrong decision, but I understand her decision, sympathize with the awful result (not making the team) and hope she'll stick around of a while. She's a classy lady and a great athlete, and I don't think we've yet seen her at her best.

Fastnbulbous wrote:

That was incredibly painful to watch. She was going so slow at the end, I thought she popped her hamstring and it wouldn't matter anyway. So she's not injured? What could possibly have gone so wrong that she couldn't even run properly? She looked so incredibly awful, like that woman who had heatstroke in the Olympic marathon and was weaving all over the place. Painful. All she had to do was just run five more strides like a normal human to hold third.

rojo wrote:

I don't know what to say other than - my god, I feel for you.

You went for the win and it backfired but you forever have my respect. " People admire Steve Prefontaine going for the win at all costs..."

This is what is so perplexing about you Brojo's at times...you can't quite think things all the way through.

Context most similar to this race: Prefontaine in Munich.

Pre went for it at the Olympic Games where it was thought his only chance was to push the pace.

Ms. Lucas went for it at the Trials, where she only needed to make the team. Had she waited a 1/4, a half or maybe even another lap...as the field would have probably allowed her...she goes to the Olympics.

Now she gets a summer vacation watching London poorly announced by NBC.

Damn. That video made me feel so bad for her.

Wow.

Obviously those of you who have bashed Julia are quite far from being elite. Any good athlete knows that you have good days and bad days. You do everything you can to maximize the chance of having a good day when you race, but there is so much you can't control. Julia was smart and attempted the right move for that day. Her move was off by 100 meters at most, but most likely 3 steps. She said she didn't feel a 100%, and anyone good knows that you aren't out kicking the best in the country if you are having even a slightly off day. It was the right idea to take the athletes that lacked the strength to run the A standard out of the race by making it a strength race.

Julia was total class and I feel for her!

You have to have respect for how Ms. Lucas presented herself afterwards.

As far as the race goes, it wasn't the smartest move, especially if the greater aim was to make the team, not win the race, but over the years (about 40 of them now), at times I've gone too early in every thing from 800m to 5k road races and it's very easy to overestimate what you have left some way out when the pace is relatively comfortable.

What experience - and I should say sometimes painful experience - from what must be around 800 races has taught me is that the long run for home is a very worthwhile tactic, but it really needs to be very controlled with gradual acceleration. Probably a 72, 71, and 70/69 would have done the job a lot better than kicking in the 69s two and three laps out.

Am I overrating how exciting and gripping the last 20 seconds was? I think someone in the ESPN newsroom needs to look at doing one of their special documentaries. Fascinating to break down this modern day Greek tragedy.

some guy in a cube wrote:

I haven't read all the posts in this thread yet but 1 page in and what the majority of you are saying sickens me. Sure she may have made a tactical mistake but what gives any of you on this message board the right to bash her and say you have no respect for her?

Please show us a post in this thread where someone stated they had no respect for her. Do not confuse constructive criticism with a lack of respect. Au contraire, mon ami.

Marius Maximus wrote:

Stop me if you know all this, but it's lactic acid buildup.

Stop. We're runners, for Cripes sake.

Arrogance, insecurity, bravery, ignorance, fear, humility, graciousness... any of us who have followed Julia's career over the years are not surprised in the least.

She mentioned Flanagan's blowup(s) at NCAAs, and could throw Barringer's collapse as well. Some female runners seem fated to go through this sort of dramatic failure on their way to the top (in Suzy Hamilton's case, while already there). These however were more mental shutdowns rather than errors of execution (although she was shutting down on all fronts at the end).

It is hard to conjure a comparable blunder in the annals of the sport. Anyone have one?

After reading all I could about the tactics of the race, I thought Julia did what she had to do. I came away thinking, "What a brave athlete."

Then I watch her post-race interview. My opinion of Julia grew by leaps and bounds.

I then went here to the forum to post something positive and read just a few of what others might have to say.

Again, it was disheartening to read there were those who did not see the beauty of racing and running.

I would guess, they were never in the same situation that Julia found herself in.

Julia! Way to go!!