Sophomore distance runner Juli Accurso is taking her running shoes to Seattle this weekend.
Accurso, who is 26th in the country in the 3,000-meter run, and coach Clay Calkins have flown to the West Coast to compete against some of the best athletes in the nation at the Flotrack Husky Classic Friday.
“When you get to be that good, it’s hard to find competition,” said distance coach Mitch Bentley. “You run out of people to race against who are better than you.”
The Husky Classic has traditionally been where all the fastest runners come together to battle it out on the same track. Many of the fastest times of the year are recorded there and set the lineup for the NCAA Championships.
The rest of the Bobcats will travel to Bloomington, Ind., Friday and Saturday for the Hoosier Hills Invitational. The athletes competed this past weekend in a two-day meet and will do the same this weekend.
Bentley said competing in back-to-back two-day meets is difficult on runners because they cannot always fit two hard workouts in one week and then have meets on the weekend. But maybe the track will help them out.
The Harry Gladstein Fieldhouse track is a banked 200-meter track, which the team has yet to compete on this year. On a banked track, the turns are elevated, giving runners a little more momentum.
“It’s supposed to compensate for the fact that you’re losing momentum anyhow on a shorter track that isn’t banked because a lot of your centrifugal force is lost when you’re turning left all the time,” Bentley said.
Bentley said the team is excited to run on Indiana’s track and is looking to set more personal-best records. The Bobcats need to keep improving in order to get into the fast heats for the Mid-American Conference Championships. If they are in the slow heats, the odds are very slim that they are going to place because the general pace of the race is slower.
nb155607@ohiou.edu
