Phil Hagedorn

Past Entries

Entry 1

Entry 2

Entry 3

September 29, 2003

It seems that I've been blessed, at least thus far, as the guy who gets to write his diary whenever the team has an off weekend. Normally this would automatically find me talking about how we were able to work out harder because we didn't have a meet to worry about or how nice it is to have the weekend off.

Instead, I'm going to talk about something different we did last Sunday. The Atlanta Track Club is a fairly large organization as far as running clubs go and is fairly active in the metro Atlanta area.

Last Sunday the club held a race known as an Ekiden. Imported from Japan the concept behind the Ekiden is as follows: each member of a team, made up of six runners, must run the equivalent of a sixth of a marathon (26.2 miles). This comes out to around 4.3 miles per runner.

Coach Graham split the team into three groups and Sunday morning we all woke up at the crack of dawn, ran down to Piedmont Park in the middle of Atlanta and took our turns running our respective legs of the Ekiden. While this doesn't sound too particularly exciting I assure you: it was.

It's been a while since I've participated in a race where the atmosphere was anything but competitive. Instructed by Coach Graham to tempo our 4.3 miles, we knew that there was no reason to get worked up.

With hundreds of people milling around, warming up and getting ready for the race, we were able to joke around with each other and other runners, which simply would have been impossible on a regular race morning. As Paul Tufaro, Andrew Podgurski, and I circled the course together (we were each placed on separate teams) we laughed, talked and befriended the policemen guiding the runners through the course.

While it certainly seems a cliche given the context of our off week, I can honestly say that Sunday morning was a welcome respite from the tense, competitive race atmosphere we encounter on normal weekends. I can only hope that the team continues to participate in similar events as the years pass.

Phil Hagedorn is a senior from Atlanta. He would love to answer e-mail questions from Emory recruits and fans.