The site that hosts most of our meet results, athletic.net is trying to gin up interest in Virtual Meets this spring. Basically, you go find an empty track or a stretch of path and record a race. You can post a video of the whole thing or a screenshot from mapmyrun or whatever.

Anyhow, it's silly but our team was looking to have one of our better seasons in awhile so having stuff canceled - while certainly not on even the longest list of concerns right now - was kind of sad. So, we pitched the kids on giving this a try. Part of the convincing process was trying it out ourselves.

I wasn't a great runner myself. Call it "a useful-to-good relay leg from 200-800m on mediocre D3 team" and I haven't raced anything in almost twenty years since I graduated. Choosing an event was difficult, as racing at full effort now would almost certainly explode both my hamstrings and my back, but I'm also about forty pounds above my racing weight so distance stuff is kind of out of the question.

Settled on 200m and hoped that I could run safely under 40 seconds without:

-visually appearing to work very hard
-hurting myself

The answer was a nice, safe 80% effort and a 36.8h time. The video is kind of gruesome, though. While I definitely met the first objective of not looking like I was really fighting out there, you can see me at two separate times in the race trying to physically remember what the proper form for a hard 200m race was. At about 45-55m you can see my upper half form into an awkward board-straight back. My knees look like I was trying to achieve an exaggerated high all the way around, though that one may be a bit of an illusion. Even when I was young, I ran with pretty high knees - but the difference is that I was turning over quickly so it didn't *look* like I was prancing.

Anyhow, I didn't hurt myself. The time was pretty wretched, but I think I could take a decent shot at running under :30 again if I was willing to risk a bit more, physically.

Also, we got 26 kids to participate. I am taking credit.