A preview of tonight's Track Fest, a state-recordish performance in the mile by Aidan [---], and a terse GNAC wrap-up

Katelyn Tuohy has the NCAA 5,000-meter record in her sights; Hayden grabs a conference title, and the Baystate Running Mile sees another jump from a precocious legend

A week ago, I hyped up my nephew’s then-impending attempt to run 1:57.5 or faster in the 800-meter run at his conference championship meet and qualify for the NCAA Division III New England Region Championships this weekend. In the interest of a quick turnaround, I’m following up on that post. Unfortunately, the weather was dismal, but Hayden wound up winning the Great Northeast Athletic Conference title 800 meters in a time of 2:05.28. He also led his team to first place in the 4 × 800-meter relay, an event he and his mates are running tomorrow at the New England Regionals (live results).

Hayden bettered his outdoor 800-meter time by 15.83 seconds between his last season of high-school track in 2021 and his first collegiate season last spring, improving from 2:23.31 to 2:07.48. In the year since, he has cleaved another 7.58 seconds from his personal best to become a sub-two guy (1:59.90). Since 7.58 is about half of 15.83, Hayden can expect to knock another 3.5 seconds or so from that 1:59.9 next year as a junior, and another 1.7 or so as a senior. That means he should be well under 1:55 in two years.

I’m being cheeky with the math—everyone loves a good, simple geometric series—but I do believe he can run 1:54 before he’s done.

Aidan Cox is another solid runner from New Hampshire. The holder of an 800-meter personal best of 2:00.70, in fact, Cox is arguably almost as solid an athlete as Hayden, and might to catch up eventually given that he’s two years younger. Cox raced in the Baystate Running Elite Scholastic Mile last night at Marshfield High School on the “South Shore” of Massachusetts.

Cox’s race and the corresponding girls’ race are in the video below, not in that order.

The results of both races are here. In improving his fastest mile from 4:14.76—which he recorded at the New England Indoor Championships two months ago—to 4:10.01, Cox ran the fastest-ever full mile by New Hampshire high-schooler, at least a public-school kid. Because New Hampshire, like most U.S. states, dropped the mile and two-mile over forty years ago in favor of the bastard-compromise 1,600-meter and 3,200-meter distances, no mile record is even kept.

The New Hampshire 1,600-meter record currently belongs to Francis Hernandez of Bishop Guertin, who ran 4:07.76 in 2010. Cox’s 4:10.01 mile converts to around 4:08.4 for the metric distance. But the real question to me is, will Cox break 8:50 for two miles this spring or will he “only” do this for 3,200 meters?

Certain closed-captioning systems don’t approve of Cox’s name. This echoes of matchups between sprinters Tyson Gay and Walter Dix ten years ago, which always bore the potential for headlines such as “Gay Takes the Measure of Dix in Rome.”

“Cox Deflated After Rash of Groin Injuries” would belong in the same class of ribald-looking truths if it happened, which I’m reluctantly hoping it doesn’t.

You may have notice that HOKA sponsored these elite scholastic miles and provided identical singlets for all 27 entrants, including the two pacers. You may also have noticed that all 27 of those athletes had Nike spikes on their feet. This is even funnier than any of my fake headlines.

Finally, Sound Running’s Track Fest, presented by On Running, is being streamed from Portland, Oregon Mount San Antonio College in California starting at 5:45 Pacific Daylight Time. If you don’t want to pay the $5.99, or even if you do, live results are here.

The entire production is a distance carnival. After unseeded sections of the men’s and women’s 800 meters, 1,500 meters, and 5,000 meters, the top-seeded races start at 7:20 p.m. with the women’s steeplechase.

To me, the most interesting storylines are Katelyn Tuohy presumably taking a shot at the NCAA 5,000-meter record (15:01.70, Jenny Barringer’s indoor mark from 2009); the return of 2016 Olympic 1,500-meter gold medalist Matthew Centrowitz Jr. to high-profile (sort of) competition; and a field of 22 runners in the men’s steeplechase, which will almost certainly result in a fall on the second lap of the race. No one should have to live under those conditions.

No one should have to look at Centro anymore, either. Shelby Houlihan might even still be clean, or at least uncaught, if not for her association with that guy. I can’t wait.

I’ve been busier than usual over the past week, and if I elect to continue purchasing time to spend among the rest of you eaters, breathers, shitters, and sleepers—in no way an attractive prospect at this point—this pattern of redistributed priorities will necessarily continue. But being busy “earning” “money” is not really why my output here has been sparse.

Over the past few years, I’ve had few periods longer than a day or two when I didn’t feel like writing at all; the sheer rate and scale of civilizational decay have proven stronger than any creative malaise I’ve experienced, so I’ve kept blurting about aspects of this polyrot more out of sheer wonder than systematically. And even when I’ve been more repulsed than morbidly transfixed by the bullshit going on, leading me to ignore the propaganda-cycle for a couple of days, I’ve often felt like writing about something. The result has been few genuine dry periods on Beck of the Pack.

I don’t know if I will ever return to my previous level of output. Lately, whenever I start to write, after I’m between three sentences to three paragraphs in, I realize that no one really fucking cares about any of this shit, including me. This is just another form of bitching, perhaps more sophisticated on its face than that of the armies of trannies and uglies and tubbies and racists also contributing aggrieved blurting to a pointless scrum of shouting by blinkered and doomed dungmonkeys. Sometimes I even say “Who the fuck cares?” out loud.

This is not a “veiled” call for people to protest to the contrary and bolster my spirits or at least my muse; it’s just a fact. The cocksuckers, or “C-- suckers,” have this sickened game well in hand. I won’t drag this post too far from its main focus, but I might as well announce that I give less and less of a fundamental fuck every day and am busy constructing, in my mind, the most emotionally and morally convenient exit ramps from my own existence so I can stop worrying about ways to propagate it. Sorry if that’s a bummer, but it’s not like it’s a state secret, either.