View Workout (Brandon Hahn)
Career Reflections
December 21, 2011 (Morning)
Exercise Type: Other
Comments:
I'm pretty satisfied with my college career. During my time I got to run every event from the 400 hurdles to the 8k, and trained with a ton of different groups and people. It really has been enjoyable, and even though the stress of performing would sometimes take away from the experience, being able to run good times and have success made it all worth it. It's funny because I can't look back and remember more than maybe 10 of the 100+ morning runs/pool workouts that I did (and the hundreds of hours that went into that) but I will always remember how I felt after we set the DMR school record ("terrible", because my legs hurt badly), how it felt to break the indoor mile record ("bittersweet", because I had wanted to run a provo time that race), and how it felt to make it to nats ("awesome"). It sounds stupid to say, but aside from a couple weeks here and there, I truly enjoyed every minute of the experience. It's funny because the actual running isn't even the majority of what I look back on; that certainly is a big part, but I probably spent at least 3x as much time with the team doing things not directly running-related. Don't get me wrong, there are a couple workouts that have been burned into me because it felt like a part of me died during them, but on the whole there is so much more to experience beyond the actual training.
On the topic of training though, while I am content with how everything turned out, I have to wonder what I could have run if I had spent 4 years being a mile/3k/5k guy instead of running the 3k and 5k for the first times my senior year. I spent freshman year as a 400IH/800 guy, sophomore year as an 800/1500 guy, junior year as an injured 1500/steeple guy, and senior year in my mile/steeple/5k wheelhouse. Honestly, I'm jealous of all the guys who stay with one group for 4 years. I enjoyed my time spent in various groups, but that kind of training is certainly not conducive to specializing in one area. I have complete confidence that the training program put me in a position to run the best that I possibly could, but other factors always seemed to come up and keep that from happening.
If I had not snapped my ankle in the steeple last spring, I am 100% confident in the times I could have run that season. It's frustrating to look at guys who have identical (same second) PR's as I had run in the mile, 3k, and 5k run times that were my goals in the steeple. I had spent the entire season (and in a way, my entire running career) preparing for the month of May my senior year, and I had to spend that month on crutches and limping to treatment. I trained through most of indoor and outdoor in preparation for May, and never got to show what I could really do. I mean I can sit here and say, "I would have been a national qualifier in the steeplechase" and no one can prove or disprove that statement. It eats at me that I have to say my steeple PR is 9:37 when I know I would have been around 9:15 or better. Same with the 1500. I mean I realize I'm not the first person to have an injury derail their career, but it's something that you can't understand until it happens to you. I also realize that it wasn't a career-ending injury in the sense that I was able to continue to run months later, but it was a career-ending injury in the sense that it ended my track career because my final season ended before I could get healthy. I just want to point that out. In the end I'll live with it, but the frustration is still there.
I never got to run the times I believe I could, and consequently I was not able to lower the school records in the manner that I had hoped. But in a couple years when I'm a forgotten part of Hopkins track, hopefully the people who beat my times drew a little bit of motivation from seeing my name up there on the performance list and wanting to take it down.