All last week I ran a contest to win a copy of “Coast to Coast”. There were 8 entrants. The winner of the book, by random drawing, was Brendan Fitzgerald. His story was about the Penn Relays:
One of my best memories was when I ran at the Penn Relays senior year in high school. Since the time that I heard about the event, I had always wanted to go. We were going to run both the 4×400 and the 4×100 but our fastest 400 leg went when we were sophomores and didn’t want to go again. Our coach still wanted to reward the 4�100 team for all the time and effort we put in over the year, so he took us down. Of course the trip couldn’t go as planned. As it turns out, one of our legs forgot his jersey, so we had to find a store so we could buy 4 matching tops. We managed to find a Dicks’ Sporting Goods store and got them to open early for us. Because of this set back, when we arrived at the entrance to the track, we didn�t have our numbers, or even know what heat we were in, because our coach had to park the car. Luckily we got our numbers just a few minutes before our heat. For those who don’t know, for most trial events, they put you on the track as soon as the last race finishes, and you don�t even get to watch your team finish. Well we get in line for our heat and it turns out that we are the only all white team there. We were then thrown onto the track and we ran our race and ended up in beating a team because they were DQ’d. Now when we were waiting for our heat, our coach told us were to meet him, but we didn’t hear what he said, so after the race, we proceeded to walk around the college town and the stadium looking for our coach for a few hours. Once we found him, and after we got yelled at, we found a place to sit to watch some of the races. Luckily we got to watch the shuttle hurdle relay, and me being a hurdler, this was a great chance for me to see some of the best college hurdlers in the nation compete in person. We decided to leave after a bit and we got home pretty late that night. The next day our team had a meet and I decided because I had only ran a 100 I was going to run. I ran the 110 High hurdles and the 400 intermediate hurdles. This turned out to be one of my best meets, winning the 400 hurdles, and getting second in the 110 hurdles by a nose, but running my best time in high school.
To this day, I’ve always wanted to go back to Penn, to get a chance to run with the best in the country again, and see some of the best runners in the world.
Congratulations, Brendan!
You have two days to email me the shipping address where you would like your book mailed to.
I highly recommend to everybody else that they purchase a copy of “Coast to Coast” to enjoy. Thank you to everybody for participating.
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