I went to bed last night at 11:00, too late. Fortunately, Sky View does a team breakfast and we get to sleep in a little bit. I still managed pretty good sleep. Breakfast was good, not too much, not too little. This was alot of fun and good to take my mind off of the race. We did visualizations and then headed to SV to load busses. We each got our own seat on the bus which was nice, so I took a 45ish minute nap. We got to the course about when I woke up. After watching several other races, and the after the girls raced, we warmed up. I did a little longer warmup than usual, about a mile to a mile and a half. We did several Up's and got our spikes/flats on. Conner Mantz wasn't able to warm up with us due to his leg injury. He warmed up on a stationary bike. We got to the line, passed the uniform check (didn't have to do a last second uniform change this year), did some more strides, and warmups and got ready to go. Fortunately, I started on the line and not behind someone. The gun went off and I had a slow start. I got pushed straight to the back and severely boxed in. After roughly 400 meters, I saw my dad and he yelled to get out so I more or less pushed some kids out of the way and got to the outside where I moved up. This was a bit rude, but I really had no other choice. By this point I couldn't see Mark, Nick, or Travis. Throughout the race I felt like I had more and more energy and was able to pass alot of people. I came by Travis without knowing it because of their uniform color change. I came by Nick and Mark and thought they would stay right on my tail, but they didn't. I kept moving up. With roughly 800 to go a woods cross kid and I were going about the same pace. We hit the track and I started to kick, I held him off for a while but he got me by half a second. We were able to catch Garrett Barton with about 30 meters left. I finished 14th with a time of 16:11. It was a really good race for me. Last year i took 92nd. I also had the opportunity to be interviewed agian. Our team did OK, better than last year but not quite what we were hoping for. 5th place as a team. Alex took 6th. Unfortunately, Conner Mantz took 2nd. If he hadn't been injured I'm sure he would have won it. A great experience and now I'm looking forward to more training and a good track season with these guys.
RESULTS: http://ut.milesplit.com/meets/180261/results/335730
NEWS: http://news.hjnews.com/allaccess/injured-mantz-nearly-defends-a-title/article_dd422cb6-5a71-11e4-a390-1b5edd625067.html
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