Tyler's Track Season

 Tyler signed up to run with the track team at his middle school this year. After practicing with the team, he was given the opportunity to run 2 events at every track meet, the mile and the 800M. When he started the season, his mile time was around 8 and a half minutes. and his 800M was around 4 minutes.

He loved running in his uniform because it was so much cooler with the tank and the material than his normal tshirts.

His Grandpa Wheeler was able to come and watch a couple of the meets which was special for him.

His final meet of the regular season, he was able to get his mile time down under 7 minutes.

And his 800M was much better than the start of the season, too.

He thought for sure that he was going to run in Alpine Days, the only post season meet. Only the top 3 times for each event/grade/sex get to go. He was told at the first practice after the final meet that he didn't qualify. There was a 7th grade boy that had run the mile in the first meet and got a better time than him. This boy hadn't run the mile in any other meet. Tyler was so upset that he wouldn't get to run in Alpine days, but continued to go to practice anyways after returning his uniform. And then on the Friday before Alpine Days (which was Monday and Tuesday), his coach called him out of class and asked him if he would like to run the mile in Alpine Days. He was so excited! He had to get a new uniform after school that day.

I was able to slip away from work to watch him run.

He had one of the slowest times, and the 2 that were slower than him didn't even show up to the race that day (funny thing is that they were from American Heritage). He was able to finish the race in front of quite a few of the other runners, so he did better than we expected.

He now has the runners itch and has been running consistently this summer. He plans to do cross country in the fall and track again in the spring. We love seeing him get stronger and improving. The two of us are going to run in the temple to temple race again on July 24th, so I have been trying to run 3 times a week, as well, so that I can hopefully not slow him down too much.