Yesterday at Highland, the Track and Field team triumphantly ran their last home meet for the 2018 season. Not only was this the last home meet, for many this is the last meet for the season. From here on out, only the top performers will be going on the Varsity invitational meets over the next two weeks.

The non-invitational meet every season is the meet for everyone to pull out all the stops and do something new to end the season on a high note. A few sophomore runners on the distance team took this idea to heart. It is already a tradition among the long distance runners to run every single distance race in one meet. This includes the 1600 meter (1 mile), the 400 meter, the 800 meter, the 3200 meter, and the 4×400 meter relay. This is known as the distance challenge. Any runner brave enough to run the distance challenge is rewarded at the next practice. Even with all of this running, a select few sophomores took it a step farther: they ran every single sprinting race as well. These races are the 100 meter dash, the 200 meter dash, and the 4×100 relay. That adds up to 8 races and a grand total of 6,800 meters (4.25 miles) of racing.

Some may think this is crazy or even borderline dangerous but not every race was run at the full potential of a regular race. In all cases, it greatly affected times and overall performance of the brave runners. When speaking with them they had no doubt in that every race was worth it to run even if many of them had to be interviewed from the ground.

“For fun. Tera the coach said we would get something if we ran all the distance races so I wanted to take it a step farther and run every race except for the hurdles and it was fun, it was tiring, but it was worth it.” Sophomore runner Ethan Blume said, when asked why he had chosen to do all of these races.

All together, only six members of the team were hearty enough to run all the races, what some people were referring to as “the iron man.”

Both 4×400 teams from Highland won their races by a huge margin. Both the boys and the girls’ teams had their top distance runners, sprinter, and hurdler running together, making up a kind of super-group that didn’t disappoint. People were calling it “the dream team.”

When asked about the meet, senior Noah Shepard said, “I think sprinting is the optimal sport,” though it should be noted that Shepard was not able to run the “iron man” challenge of all eight running races.

Overall, Highland performed well, and it’s a good way to conclude the season and the high school running careers of many of our Running Rams.