The New England High-School Indoor Championships are today at "The Reggie"
Also this weekend: Sound Running's The TEN, the Tokyo Marathon, and a strangely good D-III runner
I’ll never get used to the fact that no one outside the northeastern U.S. cares that five tiny states and one medium-sized patch of impenetrable woods go by a collective regional name, and that most of this region’s residents root for the same sports teams and abuse English—not the people, just the language—using the same abhorrent accent.
I do feel that more folks should be aware that old England (50,301 square miles) could easily fit inside New England (71,988 square miles), just so they could gain an appreciation of both how huge and unwieldy the United States is and how many people are squeezed into Europe. If Colorado had England’s population density, it would contain 117 million people. That would be a lot of crowded tents strewn up and down the slopes of the Rockies.
No wonder England is responsible for such an alarming amount of nonsense; you can’t expect 50 million people standing elbow-to-elbow, cracking anhydrous jokes while pounding tea and acknowledging monarch after latter-day monarch, to not eventually decide to take over the world and botch the whole scheme while exporting grog, venereal diseases, and lumpy pudding.
My knowledge of global colonial history thus exhausted, now comes a short preview of the 35th New England Interscholastic Indoor Track and Field Championships, which are at the Reggie Lewis Trach Athletic Complex and scheduled to start at noon Eastern Time. As I type this, the livestream says the meet starts at 10:30 a.m., but a winter storm—a thrilling feature that old England lacks—has created (pick one) grim, gruesome, or grisly travel conditions and forced a ninety-minute delay.
If you already missed some or all of the meet, no worries; the replay is expected to contain the same material as the original livestream. Once the Metaverse arrives, each of us will be able to edit track-meet livestreams so that we win every race, jump, and throw in the competition. At that stage, I’ll have transitioned out of jogging and into a relief pitcher for the Houston Astros who scuffs and slimes up the ball to compensate for a weak change-up and twenty-nine other teams stealing my catcher’s signs.
New Hampshire Track and Field published a preview of the action, while Baystate Running went a little more granular, with Stephen Mazzone writing overviews of the boys’ and girls’ middle- and long-distance events as well as previewing the throws, jumps, sprints and hurdles (link). Marathon Sports generously supports both sites.
The Indoor and Outdoor New England Track and Field Championships both accept six athletes from each state in every event, along with the top six 4 × 800-meter and 4 × 300-meter relay teams from all six states. That means that every individual event should include 36 bodies, but this never happens because no one really wants to drive thirty-six hours from St. Albans, Vermont, or Fort Kent, Maine to Boston even in fair weather just to get shellacked in a 55-meter sprint, then turn around and drive thirty-six hours back toward Quebec City.
The performance lists are misleading because they’re not true performance lists—they’re the marks attained at each of the six state-championship meets that were good enough to land athletes in the top six that day. In some cases, these are personal bests, but in most they’re not, especially marks turned in by distance runners who raced in multiple events at their state meets.
New Hampshire’s state meet was three weeks ago. Some of the Granite State distance runners competing today have kept sharp in the meantime, like Jacob Redman of Bedford, who ran a 1:55 800 meters last weekend. Redman is racing the mile and has a great shot at placing in the top six, but he’ll be running out of the slow heat. And among the girls, Brianna Malone of Portsmouth Christian is also in the slow heat of the mile despite having a chance to win the event outright.
This situation will arise repeatedly throughout the meet, and not just for New Hampshire runners. I think seed times and marks should be based on athletes’ top performances of the season, not on their state-meet numbers, but if anyone cared what I thought there would be statues of me all over the nation, most of them toppled into the nearby water or dirt and spray-painted to give my marbly likeness a devil mustache, raccoon eyes, and other unsavory attributes. On the other hand, the existing scheme admittedly jacks up the drama level.
Aidan Cox of Coe-Brown Northwood Academy of New Hampshire—which fielded an undefeated coed bass-fishing team in the fall—will be skipping the two-mile despite a 3,000-meter season’s best of 8:16.65, worth 8:56.38 for two miles. Cox, who won both the 1,500 meters and 3,000 meters with ease at his D-II state meet, will run only the mile today. He has a season’s best of 4:15.12, which he ran on January 22 at the Greater Boston Track Club Invitational at Harvard. I think he can run as fast as 4:10, through 4:12 today is more realistic.
The other races I’ll be watching closely are the boys’ and girls’ 1,000 meters, both of which feature a higher-than-usual probability of meet records. If Devan Kipyego of Saint Raphael’s Academy (R.I.) were in the boys’ mile, Cox would stand no chance as Kipyego ran 4:01.04 last week at the Boston University Last Chance Invitational.1 Kipyego is instead running only the 1,000 meters today and reportedly aiming for a sub-2:25.
This evening at 6:40 p.m. Pacific Time, Sound Running’s The Ten, produced by Tracklnd.com, kicks off. The meet has multiple events, but centers on staging extremely fast 10,000-meter races for men and women. I watched this one last year, and it was worth the price ($5 this year). Based on the 10K start lists (men, women), this would be a dumb meet for anyone interested in fast racing to skip.
Dathan Ritzenhein’s On Running crew is looking like the only U.S.-based club with the capacity to prevent the best of the Bowerman Track Club from seizing too many World Championship and Olympic berths, and I can periodically suspend disbelief and pretend On Running is doing things the right way and benefiting solely from Boulder’s altitude. Joe Klecker could chase Woody Kincaid to a sub-27:00, but Grant Fisher’s American record of 26:33.84—set at The Ten last year and worthy of a laugh track including both old England and New England titters—should be safe.
If you elect to not watch the meet, or even if you do watch, live results are here.
The Tokyo Marathon is on Sunday, at least if you’re in or near Asia. The elite races start at 9:00 a.m. local time, which is 5 p.m. today in Denver. Unfortunately, FloTrack, a comprehensively unpleasant operation, has the American and Canadian broadcasting rights, which means that at least one YouTuber who hates FloTrack will try to steal and stream the feed, perhaps successfully. The leaderboard, on the other hand, is free for everyone worldwide.
Finally, I noticed that a runner for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology named Ryan Wilson has put up remarkable mid-distance times this winter, among them 1:46.61 for the 800 meters and 3:55.29 for the mile. These would be noteworthy times for a Stanford or Georgetown runner, but from a D-III kid at MIT, they’re incredible.
Look at Wilson’s progression as a collegian from a freshman running high 27’s on 8K cross-country courses to where he is now—a graduate student who still has one season of indoor track and two years of outdoor track remaining. I would not bet on this dude transferring from his graduate program in mathematical economics to a place like the University of Oregon, where no one can even add two-digit numbers, to exhaust any of that eligibility; he seems to be progressing without bound in Cambridge (the New England one) despite being surrounded by geniuses all the time.
Boston has a lot of indoor tracks. A reader this week passed along an article—not the first of its kind, but a good one—delving into why B.U.’s is so fast, not factoring in how many prestigious dopers have zipped around its strategically banked turns in the past twenty years.