Laura Santoski is a junior on the NYU women's track & field team. She will share her thoughts in this space throughout the 2011 season.
Posted February 26
Last weekend, NYU hosted a smaller meet composed of Division III teams at the Armory. It was a nice change of pace to run in a slightly less intense meet, given that most of our previous meets have been against Division I and II teams. Although I am honestly very proud that my DIII team can be competitive against DI athletes, it’s easy to lose perspective on what other DIII athletes are running. In short, we won a lot of events on Saturday, and it was a nice reminder that when it comes to UAA's (this weekend) and Nationals (in March), we’ll be ready.
It was also great to see alumni and family at the meet. The track program, particularly the women’s track program, has improved a lot in recent years and is still growing. Seeing past team members helped me remember where our team is coming from and that we’re still growing. I hope that the other juniors and I will be able to help build the program further by establishing a strong tradition of taking our sport very seriously, and I think that this recent round of record-breaking on Saturday was a very good step in that direction.
I also hope the freshmen on the team are realizing that everyone on our team has a lot of potential to run amazing times and to help shape the attitudes of future team members.
Laura Santoski is a junior on the NYU women's track & field team. She will share her thoughts in this space throughout the 2011 season.
Posted February 17
Due to nagging knee pain and a string of disappointing races, Coach McDonough and I decided that it would be beneficial for me to stay home last weekend and focus on training, rather than going to BU (Boston University). Although I was sorry to miss the meet, the bright side is that I was able to share my blogging space with a few teammates who were gracious enough to share their perspective on the weekend.
“I wish I could say Boston was great, but I had a bad throwing day so it kind of got me down. The whole experience was nice though. It was my first time traveling and staying somewhere with the team. The competition was at a high level, and those are the meets I enjoy the most.
“But, this bad throwing weekend has gotten me really motivated to work harder so I can be more competitive and ready at these kinds of meets. I guess not having a specific coach or throwing teammates makes things more difficult. Hopefully, I'll get things right. I was also happy this weekend that I had one NYU teammate watch my event (which is very rare since throwing isn't that popular, haha), which I really appreciated. Hopefully by the end of the season I'll have a slightly larger crowd.” — Vanessa Ortiz
“Boston was a great chance for us to compete against some of the better sprinters in the nation. Almost everyone hit their personal bests/season bests. Marion (Burns) ran the fastest 400 time in our conference, which was quite exciting and awesome. Gilson (Cortes) broke the school record for the 200 and won his heat. Dan (McKinney) ran a time that ranks him sixth of all NCAA DIII athletes this season and is a provisional time for nationals. All of the jumpers and our thrower did pretty well, too. Next weekend we're all excited to compete against DIII schools to actually get a gauge on how we fare on our level of competition.” — Alex Simonoff
“I was so excited by how well everyone did this weekend. Almost every sprinter hit a PR in at least one of their events, and times have been consistently dropping all season. Margaret (Smiley) and I have dropped well over a second off our times in the 200m. In Boston, Marion ran 58.63 in the 400m, making her competitive for a top spot at UAA’s. Grace (Dunn) scored another PR in the 60 hurdles. Alex destroyed the 60m again, while she and Tori (Fama) did extremely well in long and triple jump. All around it has just been amazing to watch our team build. We started this year without even a coach and now, thanks mainly to Coach Perkins, NYU sprinters are looking at their strongest season yet.” — Rachel Gellert
Laura Santoski is a junior on the NYU women's track & field team. She will share her thoughts in this space throughout the 2011 season.
Posted February 9
Last weekend, we headed to Haverford, PA, for experience running on a flat track. In my last post, I talked about how nice it is that we get to run and train on the banked track at the Armory so often. The downside is that when we have the UAA Championships for indoor track, we’ll be running on a flat track at the University of Chicago. Thus, the trip to Haverford was good experience.
When you think about running on a flat track versus running on a banked track, it probably doesn’t seem like it would make much of a difference. Running around the curves, though, feels surprisingly different on banked and flat tracks. Over the past month and a half, we’ve all gotten accustomed to running at the Armory. But, now we have to start getting used to flat tracks again so that we can be competitive at UAA’s.
There were a few NYU girls in just about every event at Haverford, but the majority of the distance girls competed in the mile. Other teams must have had similar concentrations of runners, because there were five heats of the girls’ mile alone. Our underclassmen in particular had a strong showing: freshman Emily Cousens, sophomore Georgina Norton and freshman Lorraine Brancale came in sixth, seventh and 13th, respectively, although Lorraine was competing in a different heat than Emily and Georgina.
This weekend, we’re heading to Boston University for a two-day meet. One of my most enduring memories from freshman year comes from this meet: It’s a big and very competitive meet, and I was absolutely awestruck when I watched the crowd go wild as a guy in the first heat of the mile almost broke four minutes. If anything, I’m looking forward to another spectacle this weekend at BU.
Laura Santoski is a junior on the NYU women's track & field team. She will share her thoughts in this space throughout the 2011 season.
Posted February 1
After about a week-long break from running when the cross-country season ended, and about a month of building back up to our normal mileage, the indoor track season is now in full swing.
Indoor track tends to be a fairly polarizing season for runners. A lot of long-distance runners find track to be really boring, which is understandable; when you’re running 12.5 laps around a track for one race, it gets a little repetitive. Indoor track is even worse in that sense because laps are 200 meters instead of 400 meters like an outdoor track, which means that runners in the 5k are running 25 laps in one race. Ouch!
Then there’s the particular blend of air at indoor tracks. It’s dry and dusty and stuffy and gets into your lungs and makes you cough for hours after your race. On a cool-down with Emily Cousens after a race last weekend, she commented that it’s unusual to step onto a New York City sidewalk and think, “Ahhh, fresh air!”, but that’s exactly the feeling we get after running on indoor tracks.
With that said, I happen to really like the indoor season. We train and run most of our races at the Armory on 168th Street in Manhattan, which is literally a world-class facility. The track is banked, meaning that it slopes upward from the inside lanes. This makes it a little easier to run quickly around the tight turns because your body is already leaning into the turn. As far as indoor tracks go, the Armory is a very comfortable place to run.
We’ve had three races at the Armory so far, and some of the team will be back at the Armory this weekend for the New Balance Championships. This meet is very competitive, with a lot of strong runners. Even though we’re a Division III team, we frequently race against Division I and II teams during indoor and outdoor, so the races are guaranteed to be exciting. Hopefully a few more teammates will achieve qualifying times for the NCAA Championships. But, either way, it should be an interesting weekend.
