Quinton's Last Track Meet

Quinton joined the Aurora Recreational Track Team this summer. We were excited about this particular activity because it would be something Quinton couldn’t just partially do. We find that, often times during soccer or basketball, Quinton is perfectly content to move at about half pace. He is bigger and faster than most of the kids he plays against in those sports, so if he plays about half way, he can still be competitive but not sweat too much. Not so much with track - there, he has to run his butt off to compete!

This week’s track meet was at JeffCo Stadium in the foothills. It was definitely the nicest facility we’ve been to for a track meet this year. Beautiful track, well organized field event locations, and enough space for tents and other things that you need when you are spending 6-7 hours in the sun on a Saturday morning.

Typically Quinton likes to do the standing long jump, then three running events, usually the 50 meter relay, 50 meter dash, and 100 meter dash. Today he told me that he was going to skip the field events and do all running events. I’m pretty sure it is because he has had good success in running events over the last couple of meets, and he never got first in the long jump despite liking to do it. In this particular track program, they give out ribbons for first, second, third, etc, in each “heat,” so if you win your heat, you get a blue ribbon. Quinton likes blue ribbons! His initial idea was to run the 50, 100, 200, and 400 - a race he’s never run before. After talking with his coach, however, they convinced him that he should also run the relay.

Since he wasn’t doing any field events, we had some time to kill, so we hunkered down in our tent in the shade and did some reading, played “chopsticks,” and basically relaxed for about 2 hours.

First up was the relay. Quinton is pretty fast, but by no means the fastest kid in the program. Heck, he’s not even the fastest kid in the Aurora program. That honor would go to an 8 year old girl that is about 4 inches shorter than Quinton. Man, can she move! This time she and Quinton were on the same relay team, so they easily won their heat, blue ribbon number one was secured.

After the relay was the 800m run, so we did a little more relaxing for about 30 minutes before they started calling for the 50m dash. Quinton ran a great race as you can see in the video below.

The 50m and 100m are run back to back, so after the 50 he checked right in for the 100. No video for this one - I don’t think he’d want me to show it if I did. He ended up taking third place to a couple of very fast kids from different programs in the city, though he was right on their heels. I like to see him really gut it out when he runs against faster kids. Even when he wins, he sometimes lags back a bit, but when other kids are ahead of him, the sheer look of determination on his face is a lot of fun to see!

After the 400m was run, Quinton checked in for his last race of the day, the 200m dash. I keep telling Quinton that this is his race - he is built for this race, and I believe that. He’s big, fast, and has decent stamina, and he doesn’t really slow down! I’m sometimes reminded how I have to be careful what I say in front of my kids, because despite the illusion that they aren’t listening, they typically are. Before the race he confirmed with me that this was his race, just like I said, and he was probably going to win. Well, he won his heat pretty easily, though I don’t think he had quite the competition that he had in the 100. Even still, it was a really fun race to watch.

All in all it was a great experience at the last track meet of the year. Three firsts and a third - not too shabby.