Sunday, March 1, 2009

Back on Track: Rossi Relays Report

Quick quiz: Is a 'relayer' someone who dresses up in matching spandex with three friends and carries a baton around for as little time as possible, or an overachieving hen on a mid-afternoon reprisal of her morning egg-making ritual?


Answer: Stop being close-minded. Why can't you have both? There's a natural human urge to take every phenomenon and package it neatly as this or that category, but in doing so we close ourselves off from a fantastic array of ways to view the world around us.


For example, Alex Lapides laid down the 400m leg of the men's Sprint Medley Relay early last Saturday during the annual Rossi Relays track meet at Claremont College. The team combined for a 3:45 mile, taking tenth place of 17 while edging out several SCIAC competitors. Just a few hours later, Alex relaid a relay leg by really legging another 400m to anchor the men's 4x400 race. There, Caltech posted a new season best of 3:35, improving over their time of 3:38 from the home meet two weeks ago.
Should we interpret Lapides' pained facial contortions during this reiterative lap as a noble battle against fatigue for the sake of his team's glory? Instead, open your mind to new possibilities – perhaps he was dealing with the effort of laying an egg halfway through the race. He was certainly clucking a lot just before. (By 'clucking', I mean 'whining'. Also, I really hope this egg-laying theory accurately explains that bulge in his speedsuit.)


Quick quiz: Sixteen Beavers are running in four separate Distance Medley Relay teams of four runners each. Each runner on a team will run a different distance – either one, two, three, or four laps. How many different complete team orderings are possible if two teams are women's teams, two are men's, and one particular runner must run either a 400m or 800m? Also, the race is about to start and everyone is asking where that one guy is. Nobody has seen him since he said he was “going to a better place” and took off jogging thirty minutes ago.


Answer: One. From where I was standing on a hill at the far side of the stadium, Techers were indistinguishable.


The top performance of those teams came from the women's 'A' team, which ran 14:19 for 15th place (of 18).


Quick quiz: What is an anagram of the word “relay”?


Answer: A permutation of the letters 'r-e-l-a-y'. What, not satisfied with a literal interpretation to the quiz question? If you want a deeper one, just peel back a 'layer'.


All told, Caltech competed in four different relays at Rossi – the sprint and distance medley and 4x100m and 4x400m relays. The men won the second heat of the 4x100m in 44.67s, as Noddy Eruchalu burst past the Vanguard team on the anchor leg. The women's 4x400 effort secured them a 4:32 finish, more than a full second ahead of slowest of three teams from Concordia (and only twelve seconds behind the fifth of five teams from Point Loma Nazarene). Most athletes ran three races, forming 'layer upon layer'. (Which is an anagram for exactly what they did: 'replay your lane'.)


Quick quiz: What should distance runners and field event-like people do when the sprinters are all playing at relays?


Answer: Forget it, and play with themselves. That's just what Sachith Dunatunga and Andrew Gong did, as they both set lifetime bests at 3000m (9:52 and 10:00 respectively.) Stephanie Wuerth, Clara Eng, and Masha Belyi all improved their lifetime bests, too, as they moved onto or improved their times on the Caltech all-time top ten lists for the same distance. (I don't know whether they were playing with themselves or each other, but whatever they were doing it was obviously right.)


The team will face the full competition of the SCIAC for the first time in 2009 next weekend at the SCIAC Invite at Redlands, which is the last of the info I have to relay.

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