Jonny was entered in the 800 meter run and the 4×800 meter relay in the district championships. The 4×800 relay the team needed to be in the top 4 to move on to the Regional Championships, which will be held next week. In the 800 meter run, the top 8 runners from each heat of 14 were going to move on to the finals which are going to be held this coming Saturday.
The first event event of the day was the only final event run for the day. The 4×800 relay. The boys did what was required of them to make it into the Regional Finals by easily taking 4th place, with a time of 8:01.46. Official Results can be found on Timerhub.com.
The 800 Meter run was very unusual as the pace was extremely slow. This led to being a 200 meter race for the top 8 spots. With 200 meters left to go, Jonny was in the 8th spot, but stuck on the inside and 3 or 4 kids barely behind him. He worked to the outside and ran hard the last part of the race and secured 2nd place in the heat with his worst time of the season of 2:05.49. If you weren’t a good sprinter you could have missed out on making it to the finals, by not setting a faster pace and eliminating the slower runners from contention. The 2nd heat ran only a second faster, but the top 8 runners separated themselves from the rest of the group and there wasn’t a mad dash for the 8th spot in that race. The official results are on Timerhub.com again.
In the 800 Meter Run Jonny is in the only division with more than 1 person that can run 1:57 or slower. His division has 6 runners that have all run 1:57 or better this season, including Jonny. There are only 4 people that are moving on, so Jonny is going to have to run one of his better races to make it out. In some of the other divisions there is only 1 runner who has run under 2:00 this season. And a couple divisions where someone who will probably run 2:03 or worse and still make it to regionals. Jonny’s division is stacked with 6 runners that if they were split into other divisions and regions, would all make it to the state finals, but 2 of them are not even going to make it out of districts.