USATF National Cross Country Championships

Greetings reader(s). I'm back in Sioux Falls after taking an awesome trip this weekend to Spokane, Washington for the USATF National Cross Country Championships. It was a real cool thing to be a part of. Information on the meet can be found at http://www.usatf.org/events/2010/USAXCChampionships/, here you will be able to find results, athlete quotes, footage of the races, video interviews, and other tasty treats of that nature.

You could say this weekend was a pretty good weekend for the Augustana Crew. Head Coach Tracy Hellman, who was with me and fellow freshman Kyle Blakeslee in Washington, was kept busy all weekend with calls coming in about the numerous personal bests, broken school records and national qualifying efforts from our athletes in either Ames, IA competing in the Iowa State Classic or the Dordt Invite in Sioux Center, IA. Meanwhile, out in Washington, Kyle Blakeslee had an excellent race. She finished 11th overall, which earned her a spot as an alternate to run at the Junior World Championships in Poland in March. As for me, I felt I definitely could have done better. I had some high goals for myself going into it, and I definitely did not achieve those. It was more than a little disappointing to have come as far as this and given such a cool opportunity to race against such great competition, and then to feel as though I had wasted that opportunity. But Tracy is a great coach who I have a lot of respect for, and he was somehow able to pick me up in a sense. I was soon looking forward to next week, where I think I will be able to use this experience as a confidence booster. Aside from our own races, Kyle, Tracy and I had some great times out in Spokane. We got some sweet new Nike gear, listened to some Chumbawumba, engaged in a heated argument over the future of technological advancements in airline travel (Tracy's got some great ideas that would revolutionize the air travel industry. Kyle seems to think they would never work), we met a lion cub and Rocky Rococo--yes, THE Rocky Rococo--and we saw some awesome runners race, including Shalane Flanagan, Dathan Ritzenheim, and Trevor Dunbar. As shown in the photo above (which I'll get to later), we met Ryan Hall, and apparently as I was off sulking on my cooldown, Tracy and Kyle talked to Billy Mills. He asked them how South Dakota was.

We were all really happy with this trip, and Tracy plans to start doing this more often with his freshmen. Last track season he took now-sophomore Travis Beniak out to Oregon to run in the Junior National Track Championships, and he definitely plans to continue bringing his freshmen to these kinds of things and giving them these great opportunities to get national meet experience, as our program is growing quickly into one of the premier programs in the nation for Division II.

The picture here shows me and Kyle hamming it up with Ryan Hall, who, for those of you who don't know, is a great sprouting young athlete with a lot of potential and, given time, may one day be able to hold his own against me. He was eager to learn from me, and I tried to give him some of my insight on running, racing, and even just about various life values.

More pictures may be soon to come.

First Post: Intro

I've never been all that interested in starting a personal blog like this; I've always thought of it as just an excuse to talk about oneself. Who ever wants to be the guy that just talks about himself? The guy who gives himself recognition for his own accomplishments? The guy who, in writing about his life, perhaps gives the reader (if anyone actually reads it) more information than they really wanted to know? I think the biggest problem this is going to cause me is that it will soak up a lot of my joke material. If I were to crack a joke on this new blog of mine, that joke is set in stone. It's in print! I'd never be able to use it again. Now I'm a guy who's constantly looking for opportunities to recycle jokes, and this is really just going to throw a whole new obstacle in my way of doing that.

Nevertheless, here I am. Starting my very own blog. It all started when I told Coach Jim Vahrenkamp about how I was going to be writing for the Augustana school newspaper, The Mirror, for credit this semester. I told him how I found out I would not be able to write any stories about the track team because it would be a "conflict of interest," Of course to which I responded "Where's the conflict? My interests completely coincide with track." (there's one joke out of my soon-to-be-dwindling arsenal). So Jim said, "Hey Ryan, you wanna write about track? Write for me. Write for the team's blog. Better yet, start your own. Journal your experiences as an Augie freshman on the team, I think it could be a real good recruitment tool."

Always looking for ways to help the team, I decided to do it.

So, here's my first post. Hopefully it's not too long, I tend to do that sometimes when I write. I guess I never introduced myself. My name is Ryan Evans, I hail from a suburb of the Twin Cities and I am a freshman at Augustana College in Sioux Falls, SD. I run on the cross country and track teams and I am an English major here at Augie, inspired by a love for writing. In this blog I will do just what I described in the earlier paragraph; I'll be reflecting on my experiences as a freshman on this awesome team, hopefully so that some recruits find it and get some use out of it. My first real post will be coming in a few days after I return home from the USATF Junior National Cross Country Championships in Spokane, WA this weekend. I'm really pumped for the race, and actually, thinking about writing about it afterwards is getting me pretty pumped about this whole blog idea. We'll see how it turns out.