SHOWING OFF

Yesterday, in track practice, my calves hurt. A lot. But not as much as they have before. Which is good.

Most of the boy's and girl's team was doing this pacer test which involved running back and forth across the gym and making it to the line before the beeps which speeded up. My coach gave JS and I the option of running the pacer test or jogging around the gym because we had run about twice as much as everybody else. Guess which one we chose.

Jogging around a gym is even less exciting then you might think, which we realized after a minute or two. We were watching everyone else do the test and we agreed that most of the team, both boys and girls, completely sucked. The top girl made it to level six with 18 more to run before she dropped out. And many of the boys, although I think it was their second time so I'll give them some slack, were terrible. It didn't even look that hard and nobody seemed to be going that fast which made me think that maybe we should try it.

While we were discussing how badly in shape everyone was, our legs were loosening up and feeling better. JS brought up the idea which I had been thinking about, why don't we try to do the pacer test? I told her we should show everyone how to do it and so we jumped in for the second start.

Needless to say, we dominated. Neither JS or I had even discussed the possibility of not finishing the test and we weren't about to give each other the honor of being the final girl. We both ended up being the only girls to finish the pacer test (eight levels and 70 straights altogether) although it was a little harder then it looked. Towards the end, when I could feel Tuesday's race in my legs, we still didn't know how many levels there was altogether. I was hoping there was only a few left and it was confirmed by one of the distance guys that was running next to us (who finished every time) who told us that we were almost done. And thankfully we were, so we got the priviledge of being one of the few to finish.

Our coach didn't say much after that but he was smiling so I think he was glad we decided to run it. He did tell us later that we couldn't do another (although I kind of wanted to do another) but I think he also wanted us to run it at least once to prove something to the sprinters. Which brought up the reason why we ran it in the first place. It should've been an easy day and we didn't have to do it. We chose to do it.

I think the main reason, although there was more than one, is that we wanted to show off. JS and I love racing and the only thing better than racing people you don't know, is racing (and beating) people you do know. We wanted to show that at least some of the girls were good and prove to those same girls that we were better.

It's also because we wanted to race the boys. Ever since I was a little kid, I have loved racing boys because they get so upset when a girl beats them. They still do. JS and I were just as excited to beat them now then when we did years ago. And considering how many of them didn't finish at least one (although some finished them all which I'll give them credit for), we were showing them that yes, there are girls that can still beat them. One of our purposes was to impress both track teams which I think we might've achieved judging by the compliments we later received.