This past weekend, the Palisade Track team got the opportunity to compete in the Annual Liberty Bell tournament in Denver. The 2-day meet was stacked up with 53 teams from all over Colorado, who were ready to compete to their fullest.
After the team traveled all the way to Denver the week before, only for the East Invitational to be canceled the morning of, the team was eager to show these big teams that they were worthy of competition. They left early Friday morning and arrived in Denver just in time for the first day of the meet to start at 4 o’clock. Almost all the sprinters competed in their events on the first day, and almost all hit amazing new personal records. It was clear the meet was a lot different than anything the runners had experienced locally, for example, each race had dozens of heats, so there was a whole new mental battle for the runners.
After the first day ended at almost 9:30, the team returned to the hotel and crashed until the next early morning when they had a full day ahead of them. The distance team ran their races on Saturday, where the boys 4×800 team hit a new PR, and the girl’s team came very close to their PR. Zenon Reece also competed in the 800 the night before and 1600 on Saturday, both days racing very well against some of the best in the state. The throwers team also had their events scattered throughout the day, also hitting many new PRs. One thrower, Dawson David even qualified for finals in Discus. Finally, the 4 x 400 teams closed off the day, each fiercely competing to qualify for states in the next couple of weeks. I asked Hank DeFord, a distance runner on the team, how he felt the team did, he said, “Really good, I think the competition really made us do better, and I’m happy with our performance.”
After a long weekend, the team had a long ride back to Palisade where the exhausted runners arrived at 10 o’clock Saturday night. All of the runners performed extremely well and should be incredibly proud of themselves.