Mass Middle School State Championships

Today was the 2015 Massachusetts Middle School Track and Field Championship Meet -- big day for the Lydia and the Diamond Middle School track team.

Early bus from Lexington (7:30am); Lydia and were up well beforehand and had a nice breakfast of oatmeal and fruit. At around 11 my brother drove up from his place and we piled into the car to drive out to Fitchburg State University to catch the big event.

The weather, thank goodness, was perfect-- much cooler than last year. Sunny, breezy, high 60's (which down on the track translates into low 70's, since the astroturf heats up a lot in the sun). The scene:

This is a shot from one of the earlier heats -- one of Lydia's teammates (7th grader) running:

Lydia was in the last (fastest) heat for the girls 400M. Here are some shots. Tight pack of runners coming aroung the curve:

Starting to spread out:

Into the final stretch:

Lydia came in third, with a new personal record at 1 minute 3.6 seconds. Very close finish (she was 0.4 seconds off the leader). Third in the entire state-- wow!

Rustin, who was a very good sport sitting through 5+ hours worth of middle school track races one after the other (it gets sort of mind-numbing after a while):

Lydia getting her medal for the individual event:

After that it was a whole series of other events, then finally around 5pm it was the 4x400M relay. I don't have any photos of the actual race -- at the point that it started I realized that I had left my camera in my other bag, phooey.

It was a lot of fun to watch, I can tell you that. Lydia ran the first leg, and she opened up an absolutely huge lead over all the other runners; when she handed off to her teammate I could see the rest of the girls on her team were totally energized, and the other teams were already looking a little desperate.

Her team finished way, way out in front of the the rest of the pack; must have been a new school record for girls 4x400M, at least that would be my guess.

Medals for the relay:

Drove back home and made spaghetti for dinner; Lydia was pretty hungry when she got home.

Final results for the meet here.

Sports

I am afraid that I fell down on the job this fall with respect to taking photos of the kids sports activities. I only made it to one of Ethan's meets, and with Lydia I was too busy coaching to take pictures. Here are a few odds and ends. This is Lydia just before one of her games-- you can't really tell from the photo, but the weather was brutal (intermittent rain, wind, very cold):

This fall the format was 8-v-8 for Lydia's age group. We did the travel league, since there isn't an in-town option for girls at this point. It was fun, although the division we were placed into was very tough -- we only won 2 games. Lydia was a defensive specialist; she was usually the fastest player on the field, too.

Team photo, minus yours truly.

Here's the start of the JV race for the one home cross-country meet that I was able to get to. Ethan is in there if you look for him:

This is about the half-way point. I took lots of other photos but the focus was horrendous (I miss not having my VR telephoto lens, arg).

As with the situation at Diamond middle school, the boys teams are good, but the girls teams are incredibly good. The depth and the level of participation is amazing.