Friday, April 8, 2011

Up coming local events for track fans

Hey track fans! There is some exciting events coming up in the SoCal area that I wanted to bring your attention to. On Sunday April 10, Chris McDougall (author of Born to Run) is leading a barefoot/trail run in Griffith Park along with a book signing of Born to Run. The event starts at 1:00pm at A Runners Circle Running Store in L.A. Scott Jurek will be there too!

There are two track meets that would be worth watching this weekend too. The Arcadia Invitational starts tonight and will be live on runnerspace.com. This is always one of the best High School meets in the country, especially on the west coast. Last year the boys 2 mile had something like 16 kids go under 9 minutes! The other event started yesterday is the Rafer Johnson/Jackie Joyner Kersee Inviational at UCLA. There will be some top athletes there and JJK will be there too. Saturday at noon they scheduled a "walk with Jackie." I don't know what that means but it should be a good time. They are running the mile Saturday afternoon.

Next weekend there are two more track meets worth checking out. The Mt SAC Relays will also have some of the top runners in the country and a few Olympians I'm sure. That is April 14 and 15. UCLA is also hosting a dual meet with Oregon at Drake Stadium in L.A. on April 17th which sounds really exciting. Running events start at 1:00pm and should conclude by 3:00pm. Here is the schedule.

Finally, the USC and UCLA dual meet is at USC on May 1st. This is always a fun meet as there is an intense rivalry between the two schools. The Payton Jordan Invitational at Stanford is the same day and always attracts some of the best runners in the country. Flotrack should have it streamed live.

Oh, and of course the London Marathon and Boston Marathon are on April 17th and 18th respectively and both should be great to watch with top Americans in both races.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the info Karl, Just watched Sarah Baxter blow away the field with a 10:14 in the 3200. She has to lower that 8 seconds to get the all time freshman record.

Chuck said...

Thank you for all the information. Sunday morning at 2am the Rotterdam Marathon is live on Universal Sports. There are no elite Americans in the race, but there could be a new mens marathon world record. I am planning on watching it.

Karl Stutelberg said...

That Sarah Baxter is incredible! I also saw that her Simi HS team won the 4x1600m relay with her on the anchor leg! I think they averaged under 5:30 each!

Daniel said...

Sarah splited at 4:53 in the relay. I think she can go faster, still in the 3200. I see her around campus once every so often, she is really nice. I don't teach any freshman classes but I do have sophomores, so she might be in one of my classes next year.

Chuck said...

Ed Whitlock ran 3:25:40 at the Rotterdam Marathon. He went out at sub 3:20 pace (1:39:50 at the half). His bib number was 80. Amazing!!