<ken from the mild Minnesota winter to sunny San Diego, CJ Dale ’13, Dylan Cheever ’13, Colby Seyferth ’15 and Evan McNeil ’15 bloomed into a flurry of throwing, running and jumping at the Point Loma decathlon.
The decathlon is all of track and field distilled into one highly demanding two-day spectacle. Each athlete competes in ten events, their performances are turned into scores by comparing them to benchmark performances and the competitor with the highest total score gets to update their Facebook status to “World’s Greatest Athlete.”
While the Carleton men might not have earned that title, they could arguably be called the “World’s Greatest Athletes Who Ate at Rubio’s Earlier that Day.” Cheever was inspired by the savory fish tacos he had for lunch to blast away the rest of the field in the 1500-meter run, winning by more than 20 seconds. Seyferth ran the fastest times in the 100- and 400-meter dashes, probably on his way to get another churro, and McNeil capped off his cheesy chicken taquitos by clearing the second highest height of 4.10m in the pole vault.
The much less athletic—but well endowed with endurance—members of the distance squad made the journey to St. John’s last Saturday. Bobby Davis ’13 jump-started the day by setting a new personal best in the 10,000 meters. The 10k is 25 laps on the track and also happens to be over 9,000 meters. Marcus Huderle ’14 called Bobby’s bet by setting his own personal best in the steeplechase with at time of 9:29.
Noah Laack-Veeder (or maybe Thor) ’15 didn’t want to be left out, so he ran a blistering 4:01.9 in the 1,500 meters, a PR and dangerously close to the four-minute mark. Ben Levy ’15 and his gorgeous hamstrings clocked in at 4:38 in an earlier heat of the 1,500.
Famous Johnson ’12 and Oliver Heywood ’15 paced each other to smash the two-minute and ten-second mark in the 800-meters. Heywood broke the line at 2:07 followed closely by Johnson (2:08) who attributed his impressive performance to left over chicken strips from Sayles the night before. “It’s the breakfast of champions,” Johnson told reporters after the race, “I just popped them in my fridge last night and they were nice and fresh this morning.” The Knights competed in their first home meet on our new track last night, but finished after this went to press.