Friday, July 31, 2009

A Workout to Remember

My workout last night was one for the ages, but not because of the workout itself. I drove out to River Falls, WI to run with my college teammates Kyle and Justin and a current UWRF runner, Scotty. We were going to go to the UWRF track to do a 5 mile tempo run at goal marathon pace. The track and football field was setup for the Kansas City Chiefs training camp as they hold their camp on the campus there every summer. Practice starts today so we showed up to get our workout in the night before the place turned into a zoo. As we got going on the workout we were hitting pace real well and everyone was feeling good until the 2nd mile.

During the 2nd mile, two people in red shirts came out to the track to tell us we had to leave the track. Needless to say, we weren't going to stop just because a couple guys told us to when they had no real authority. Both of them were working for the campus for the training camp, one of them was a former football player and "track athlete" for the university. We had only 20 minutes left at that point so we just kept going. The two guys continued to yell at us quite disrespectfully each time we went by, so I finally said, "If you want us to stop, then catch us!" Kyle and Justin also had their own things to say. Eventually, the former "athlete" got on the phone and 3.5 miles in the campus police arrived and our workout came to an end.

We could all tell right away the campus policeman thought it was ridiculous that he had to come out here to deal with something like this. We explained our story and that we were doing nothing wrong and that there were no signs telling us to stay off the track. He fully agreed with us and decided to talk to the head of the facilities, a former coach of ours no less, to let him know this call was ridiculous. We still left the track and ran over to the River Falls High School track to do 2 more miles at pace. On our way over, we spotted the two guys who had gone on a power trip, and needless to say when they saw us coming, they both went and hid inside the hockey arena!

We finished our workout at the high school track but we were all still fuming and had the adrenaline pumping even on our cool down run after the workout. Justin even ran 100 meters backwards during the final 2 miles of the tempo and kept his pace!

This report of the situation is much calmer than it would've been had I written this post last night. I felt it would be better to sleep on it before I posted. I don't normally badmouth people unless they really get me fired up but one thing that will always get me fired up is a complete disrespect for runners, especially by football players, and especially when we know we are doing nothing wrong. However, this workout/moment takes the cake for me.

1 comment:

Joel Heebink said...

Quite an adventure. You always seem to have something weird happen. Better when you have a couple of running friends to share the experience. Football players should stay on the football field and leave the track to the runners.