European Racing Opener: Meeting de Liege
800 meters. Not exactly my event, but I figured it would be a good rust buster after only having been over here for 3 days... and it is my first race ever across the pond.
The town of Liege had a very French feel to it. All of the signs were in French. The roads were French. The buildings were French. And top ot off the people spoke French. Awesome.
I could finally understand what people other than the Americans were talking about. Apparently in this area of Belgium French is much more prevalent than Dutch which works out nicely for me.
I was not very nervous for this race since I had no expectations. It was so up in the air how my body would react to racing with the time change that I couldn't reasonably think about a mark that I wanted to hit. I wanted to run a PR but didn't invest too much mental energy into it. I simply wanted to get a good, hard effort in and see what my body could produce. Turns out it wasn't much to write home about.
I ended up running 1:48.20 for fourth and felt pretty good about it. Especially since I felt like I was sprinting from the gun and never relaxed or felt smooth. I think my splits were 26, 53(27), 1:20-high (27), 1:48.20 (27).
Pretty good start for me and since I didn't completely bomb it points towards good things happening later in the trip.
After the race, John, who rabbited us through the first 400m, and I did a 10 minute steady run just to get our breathing up a bit and feel like we actually accomplished something on the day. This certainly accomplished the goal since we ended up running about 4:45 pace.
I also got to see Christian for a little bit since he was running in the 800-meter "A" race. By the time his race went off I was already on my second beer. God, European track meets are awesome!
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