Track and Field Blogs - Mark From Flotrack

Sorry I have not posted in a while and I promise I will get back in the grove of posting about the ins and outs of Flotrack if you want, so let me know. This past weekend in Cali at Mt. SAC was amazing for a couple of reasons. I guess have to talk about the meet it self first before I talk about what blew me away. Mt. SAC is like nothing I have ever seen before. 22,000 kids ran over two packed days. Most of the time there were three races on the course at the same time..... and the course criss-crosses! A race goes off every 7 mins and runners from three different races will be finishing together, which made it very hard to film. This leads me to other reason this weekend was amazing.

XC is a very difficult sport to cover and make entertaining. Two weekends ago at Pre- Nats we jumped on the cart and experimented to see if we could make it more exciting. I think we did a pretty good job at Pre-Nats and we are pumped to push the envelope even further in our up coming meets. Mt. SAC was a totally different beast, there were no lead gators to jump on and film from and unlike Pre Nats, where there were 4 races, Mt. SAC had 103 and somehow 3 at the same time! Nothing that is done at Flotrack is because of me alone. The Design of the site, the videos, the meets that we cover are all a team effort and that could not be more true then this past weekend at Mt. SAC. Kevin Selby, David Williams and Victor Herrera totally blew me away at Mt. SAC. It was hot, dusty, and winding but they all worked their but off running from point to point to get the shots. We missed some races, mostly because I did not know what 103 races over 2 days was really like. If we missed your race I am sorry and we are working to make sure that we do not do it again. That being said, the trio of Selby, Victor and David were amazing and I just wanted them to know that i was in awe on how hard you guys worked. Thanks!

I was asked a couple times at the meet and have gotten a couple emails asking if we are moving to high school. the answer is that we want to cover the best and the coolest events and this past weekend Mt. SAC was it and a York High School workout is amazing no matter what level.

Man this blog is getting long and I still have to more points I want to make. Maybe I should blog more so this doesn't happen? Anyway I wanted to talk about the contributed articles, videos and contributors in general. I have gotten some emails about why are we allowing this person to write articles and this team to post videos. I get passionate and a lil angry (if you could believe that) when I read these emails. The reason I get passionate is because our sport is dying, yes over the last couple of years we have had somewhat of a resurgence but if you look at a graph of our sports popularity (I don't have this graph or know if it exsits) over the last 30 years it would be negative. Everybody has some reason why it is like this and most of the time it centers around exposure or lack there of and mainstream media. So how does this have anything to do with the new articles and videos on the site? If we don't give the writers and directors/camera guys/editors a chance, then who will? Maybe at first their articles or videos are not the most polished but they are going to get better and more entertaining. If the mainstream media does not want to cover our sport then lets do it ourselves. We are more passionate and know the sport better so we can cover it better. It might be shaky at first but if we can give people a medium to write articles and produce videos we are going to find the next great writer and exciting play by play announcer. It's hard to put your neck out there and I encourage everybody that wants our sport to grow and evolve to either write articles yourself or leave constructive criticism and words of encouragement to the contributors so we can find the next great story teller because if there is a great runner but nobody cares about him/her or the sport did he or she really exists. The Sport needs the great writers, producers and promoters as much as the great runners.

No video until Monday evening maybe Tuesday but it's worth the wait. Think Black Cactus meets contest.

I hope this was not to long.
later,

Mark

Pics are of Kevin(top), Victor(bottom whit shirt), and David(Pepperdine)