The Renegade

Amazing day. This was held at the same place as Pre-Region (Cottonwood Comoplex in SLC). I'm gonna get right to it. I got 100m into the race and I was not feeling it. I felt really slow and tired and my leg didn't feel nearly as strong as it should have. Settled into it and found myself in 12th or 13th place, and I guess I just assumed that I wasn't going to move up and all these negative thoughts passed through my mind like I wasn't even going to medal and I was going to let down the team and Bear River was going to steal all the glory for the day. I stayed in this position for the first mile and a half probably, and then I decided to latch onto this Bear River kid. I was currently in 5th place for the team behind a teammate who I had always beaten. I didn't worry about that too much. I just stayed on this BR runner. Well we got to 1.8, with a mile to go and went through this little series of hills and Hayden and I passed a few guys. I could see another BR runner right ahead of this one. I decided to chase both of them. Pretty soon I had passed Hayden, the two Bear River runners, and Nate from Ben Lomond, but everybody was still closely knit together. I was hurting pretty bad but I hear Paul cheering for me and telling me I gotta want it, and that motivated me. Hit the final 500 and I only sped up. It was an exponential uphill for 200m from this point and I could tell BR was right on my tail. I hear his coach yelling at him that he needs to go hard up the hill, so I obeyed him too. Heard somone breathing on my shoulder, I look over and it's just Hayden, what a relief. We hit the top of the hill and theres this steep downhill combined with a sharp left turn, and I passed Hayden down it. We are entering the finishing stretch and Hayden moves in front of me on my right, and a Morgan runner is coming up on my left (theres a picture of me looking over with a look of horror, it's pretty funny). Happy to say I took the fear and turned it into power. Bear River kid is falling further behind us but as far as I know I had Hayden and two other runners right behind me. 100 meters left and Hayden is still pulling ahead of me, but I let out a few ferocious Grizzly roars and move cmpletley to the front of the pack with 40m to go, and stay there. By this point, according to Strava, we are at 4:17 pace. That was arguably the most adrenaline filled finish I've ever had along with the 4x800 at region track, but this time I knew we had a team title on the line. These two events have me convinced that I perform very well under pressure. Well, turns out we won by 7 points, with all 5 scorers in the top 8. Jack took second and Elliot and Austin took 4th and 5th. I've already made a decision on my game plan for State, and it is..... I am going to stick with those two no matter what. No matter what kind of pain I have to go through, not matter how much I want to slow down. I didn't run this long to get beat by two rookie seniors, they are my teammates, adn I love them, but I know that if I can cross the line in front of them or at least within ten seconds of them, I have had an insanely succesful last race. I've just gotta make sure to get rid of some mental blocks.