Portland junior Lyndy Davis has taken on blogging duties for the women's cross country/track and field team, and she’ll be checking in from time-to-time to give fans an in-depth look into the program. Make sure to bookmark www.portlandpilots.com/DavisBlog and follow Davis and the Pilots all season.
You can send Lyndy any questions, comments or feedback that you might have by clicking HERE.
PREVIOUS BLOG ENTRIES
Entry #1 (Sept. 14, 2010)
Entry #2 (Sept. 21, 2010)
Entry #3 (Sept. 25, 2010)
Entry #4
Oct. 4, 2010
The trip to Wisconsin began rather early. We left UP at 6am. As a college student, I don’t usually get up before the sun rises, so getting up when it is still dark out is a big deal. Almost all of us slept the first flight that stopped in Phoenix. We had a couple hour lay-over in Phoenix. In Phoenix it was 90 degrees outside, so we were all really happy we were not at our final destination yet. In Wisconsin, our hotel was conveniently a couple minutes from the airport. Since we were feeling pretty sluggish and stiff from sitting all day, we went for a short run near the hotel at night. We got to explore the Milwaukee terrain…This area of town was, well, classy! On our run we ran by a strip of various sorts of food. It was a land of dunkin’ doughnuts, taco bell, pizza, and this restaurant called Beer Bellies bar and grill J Again, we were glad this was NOT our final destination.
Hundreds of miles away from our NW trendy organics, Ian still managed to find us Whole Foods for dinner. Our favorite. With Theresa’s iphone navigational system, we found Whole Foods in no time! In the morning, we woke up and went for an easy run along Lake Michigan and then hit the road for Madison. Due to some complications with the address and phone number to the hotel, we ended up driving through the Wisconsin campus. Largest campus I have ever seen! Scooters were very popular there. They even have scooter parking spaces. Continuing on our journey to find the hotel, we saw the capital building in Madison. Eventually, we thought we had found our hotel, but luckily we were at the sister hotel. This hotel was kind of a dive…Ian got directions from the awkward front desk worker. He was an uncomfortable bald oily guy (we thought he looked like Ned from the tv show Scrubs). He told us we had a 45 minute drive to our hotel, because there was traffic for the dairy festival! We all got a kick out of that.
We ran the course. It had really nice manicured grass. There were only two hills, which was a pleasant surprise from what I had heard. The way the course was designed was fairly easy for spectators to watch. As usual, the average cross-country fan has to be in decent shape to cheer on the team. Good thing Ian is in shape ;-)
That night we got ready for the race by putting on Pilot tattoos on our hips, and painting our nails purple.
The 6k race was not the race we had hoped it to be. Kellie Houser (redshirt freshman) had the most impressive race of the day. She raced really hard picking off people and fought until the end. As a team, we did not get the results we were hoping for. Given our tough summer and fall training, we did not come close to meeting our team potential. This gave our varsity a quick reality check and fire under our feet. I can speak for all of us that this race sets us up well for Pre Nats coming up on the 16th. Now that we have brushed the dust off our spikes and tested out the new white uniforms, we are ready battle in Indiana.
Furthermore, this weekend the rest of the team raced locally at Willamette (along with the guy’s team). The girls showed a solid performance. Marit had a great race leading the team in an impressive 5k time. Freshmen Natasha and Rachel also ran well. Great job girls!!!
-Lyndy Davis