High School Track, 880 Yards run and the mile relays and Cross Country.
The last four years of high school I was asked by Coach Josie to run the 880 Yard Run and the Mile relay. He also had me running Cross Country in the fall since track was always in the spring. I was a good runner and would have been a great runner had my heart really been in it. I had plenty of practice since I loved to race the bus home after school and I loved to go up on the bench and run along the road up to Snow Draw. I ran a fairly fast mile and was usually under 5 minutes and as I got older came closer to the 4 minute mile even though I never did actually run it that fast. The 880 when I started as a Freshman was really only a run but as I got older it seemed to move into the dash rather than a run. We used to run a mile each day in athletics and then we would run up the hill behind the school to the top several times. During Cross country season we would run up Utahn along the Duchesne River for several miles and it would even be the course when we hosted the competition at our school. I liked running that one since it was actually fairly flat but I didn’t really like it when we went to Tabiona because they ran up and down all of the hills. I went to a track meet in Helper once when we ran around a golf course twice. It was pretty nice because I knew what the last half of the run was like and after the first round I was back in the pack at about 25th place but since I knew what I was up against the last half I was able to move into 5th. It wasn’t my best race but it was better than it probably would have been had I not been able to go past the coach halfway through and find out how far I was back into the pack. I remember running a cross country at East Carbon also and they ran it out through the sagebrush since that was about all they had around the city. It was good for me to run in those events even though I think I got quite tired of it by the time I graduated and really haven’t done much running since then. I look at people out running though and it seems more like they are just jogging and that is probably because I remember too well how fast we had to run or be totally left behind in the race. I also have not had a desire to run that hard because I remember too many times that I would end the race and then have to go throw up. Memories like that tend to make the experience seem less enjoyable.
