A ridiculously selective review of the weekend's cornucopia of footracing
Orts from the New England and NCAA D-1 Championships and the Portland Track Festival
Most top-caliber professional track and field athletes are now preparing for their initial descent into the 2022 World Athletics Championships, slated for July 15 through July 24 in Eugene, Oregon, a city that Nike fanfolx call “Tracktown USA” but a place many others regard, fairly or otherwise, as a gigantic urinal housing a lackluster state university as well a baroque, newly renovated track-and-field facility.
The FASTEN SEAT BELTS light is on, because most of the competitors with any shot at competing at Hayward Field next month still have the turbulence of their own national championships in front of them; if you screw the pooch on that stage, the result is generally not advancing to the Worlds to represent “your” country, which increasingly often isn’t where you were born anyway.
This globally dispersed set of domestic coronations includes the USATF National Outdoor Championships, a four-day drugfest (for the fans!) set to kick off a week from Thursday at that same new beautiful, if nitrogen-redolent, athletics facility near the Pacific. (It’s really too bad Nike gets to run the entire U.S. track and road-running show, but any entity that took its organizational and financing place in this corporate-intellectual climate would deal with any existing problems by making them worse.)
Because championship races cannot be counted on to produce world-class times—usually, it goes pretty far the other way—most athletes had, before this past weekend, already taken their most focused spring-2022 stabs at reaching the marks they needed to qualify for the World Championships. But, at least in the U.S., dozens of elites toiling away at a level below the very best spent the weekend scrambling “just” to secure qualifying marks for their national championship. This was the main purpose of the Portland Track Festival—to help athletes gain qualifying marks. (Geography experts will note that this also happened in Oregon, which is not a coincidence.)
I watched some of the action described below as it happened, some of it after the fact, and much of it feeling gratified. If you watched all of these meets yourself, you would come away struck most by a completely different set of races or impressions. Also, this post is probably awash in typos, so if you decide to share it, you may want to wait a few months.
New England Interscholastic Championships
I offered a brief, New Hampshire-centric preview of a few of Saturday’s events. I thought that I was riding the line of realistic and optimistic with those, but in fact, underestimated and undersold the abilities of the runners in question.
The runner on the inside of the top set of images here is Pierce Seigne. It’s difficult to imagine a more exciting race than this 1,600-meter duel. The last thirty seconds were transfixing. You can view the race in its entirety starting here, 2:46:51 into the webcast. I also made a slow-motion video of the final 50 meters, which is useful because YouTube deals with audio elastically when the speed is altered, meaning the pitch doesn’t change and anyone speaking sounds shitfaced. (This is the only thing YouTube does well.)
You can watch a post-race interview with Seigne here. The best part is the long list of people he thanks; the funniest is the interviewer’s blatant leap into advocacy as she tries to convince him to run at the U.S. Outdoor National Championships, which he apparently plans to do now after changing his pre-New Englands mind.
Seigne is in a peculiar situation. He has never run cross-country, but in the fall is headed to Elon University, which has a men’s cross-country team (coached by Kevin Jermyn, formerly at Duke) but no track team. He entered the spring as a 4:43 1,600-meter runner (although a 1:58 800-meter runner), so he wasn’t exactly on the radar of any big-time programs. And even a 4:07 probably won’t get you a full ride to Stanford anymore. But this kid is not going to be running that slow for much longer.
Also depicted in those images was Sam Hilts blowing my expectations away by winning the 3,200 meters in 9:04.51. And he did it in deeply lopsided fashion, splitting 4:39/4:25. His best 1,600 meters coming into this spring? 4:36.
You can watch the whole race here and an interview with Hilts here. Concord as a civic entity has largely gone to hell in a shitbasket, so it’s nice to see its young runners thriving so mightily.
I watched both nights of the meet on Tracklandia, which has the URL Tracklnd.com thanks, I assume, to being late to the domain-name party. “Tracklnd” mkes m’fuckng hed twtch thnks t’th’missng vowl, but nevertheless, Jeff Merrill and Will Leer make a good announcing team. It’s funny—they engage in a lot of the usual in-banter that characterizes nontraditional track-broadcasting media, which can be a good thing or a bad thing. But both of them, especially the 3:51.82 miler Leer, have intimate knowledge of track racing, and in between bits of time-filling chatter are known to drop casual yet critical wisdom about, for example, why a particular runner is likely to have made the strategic choice he or she has based on the conditions, recent results, or health issues. These presentations are aimed at devoted track fans without leaving those who pay for and watch the webcasts by sheer accident in discursive arrears.
I also appreciate Leer’s candor. It seems he hates Letsrun.com. I don’t know why, but I respect that he says it, just like I respect my own willingness to openly hate Nike and the Bowerman Track Club without shitting on everything associated with the brand, though that day is likely coming. His jumping back and forth semi-apologetically between the role color commentator and the role of full-throated husband (Aisha Praught-Leer, who competes for Boulder-based Team Boss, was in the 5,000 meters) was actually endearing, and I say that as someone possessing, on a goof day, a charred and blackened ember where his heart is supposed to be.
These are the automatic qualifying standards for the 2022 USATF National Championships and the 2022 World Athletics Championships. If this seems like something of a non sequitur, it’s because I’m putting them side by side strictly for my own benefit and have no remaining space on my own computer for this.
To me, the most remarkable performance of the meet was the 4:11.79 1,500 meters laid down by Sadie Engelhardt, who just completed the ninth grade at Ventura High School in California. That’s worth just over 4:30 for 1,600 meters, a distance she has covered in 4:33.29 to go with a 9:50.69 3,200 meters. And yes, according to sources, she’s a real girl.
Alison Wade's weekly Fast-Women.com newsletter should be dispatched at around the same time this post is published. I am predicting that she will include a passage about Engelhardt that starts with a disclaimer about over-hyping the young, and amounts to, "No one should ever do this, but here my ass goes," and then proceeds for two paragraphs about how remarkable Sadie Engelhardt is because you just can’t ignore a girl that good. At some point, she'll just drop the pretense, tacitly admitting that she can't keep other people from noticing and commenting on remarkable feats and also that she's been a hypocrite on this issue all along.
Spanking of post-tweens, the kid who got out-leaned at the New Englands by Seigne is one of a set of identical twins, and he's the less-accomplished of the pair so far. But those two brothers have two sisters who just finished ninth grade and are also identical twins, and they're fast too.
Two sets of fast identical twins in the same family. I don't think the Cognac clan is mounting much of a response.
Also, every time I see Karissa Schweizer (who won the 1,500 meters here) interviewed, eben on a couch by two relaxed black guys, all I can think is “she’s as dirty as the day is long,” and not in the way pervs my age do thanks to those slattern’s eyes coupled to a 12-year-old’s body. And I know I’m biased, but I don’t think the bias is sheer static, I think it’s as strong a signal of shadiness as anyone can send. On the other hand, distance runners aren’t natural performers, even when regularly interviewed in the near-immediate aftermath of a less-than-perfect race.
NCAA Division I Championships
Abby Steiner of the University of Kentucky ran 21.80 for the 200 meters at this meet, which is really, really crazy. I was most caught up in Boise State’s Kristie Schoffield winning the 800 meters.
Kristie is another Concord native, but she attended Merrimack Valley High School, not Concord High. I grew up about 2.5 miles from MHVS and 7 miles from CHS, but thanks to gerrymandering, I wound up at the latter. MVHS was on the wrong side of the tracks in those days anyway, literally, but things are different today and most graduates make it to age 30 without dying or going to prison. Schoffield’s high-school coach, Bob Mullen, is and long has been one of the best and was an assistant at Concord the first year I ran varsity track. A lot of good people are excited by this outcome, as are a few like me.
(“Cornucopia,” by the way, is Latin for “horn of plenty,” and in ancient times represented an abundance of nourishment, making the word an arguably ironic choice when applied to elite distance running.)