Meet Report: 2022 Vanderbilt Invitational

I made the trek out to Nashville last weekend for the Vanderbilt Invitational. Although Atlanta doesn’t have any indoor tracks, it’s nice that it’s within a couple hours driving of quite a few.

Because I only got in to Tennessee on Friday morning, I decided to focus on the 60m (and skip the 200m which was held Friday night). Like last week, I trained normally throughout the week. My goal was to get a bit more race experience and see if my PR effort from last week was repeatable.

60m: 6.96 (slow-motion-video)

My heat had a lot of fast seed times—only one of them actually delivered. Despite a bad start, I managed to get second in the heat with a PR of just 0.01 seconds.

• My heel came up too high on the second step out of the blocks. The misstep interrupted my normal drive rhythm, and I came out a little bit slower than I wanted.
• Because of that, for the first time in quite a few races, I was at a disadvantage compared to the field after the first 20 meters.
• I did a good job staying patient and not standing up too early, which helped me pass a couple people and finish in second place.

Unfortunately, I ended up in 10th place, just 0.05 away from making finals. I think that with a second chance, I could have dipped down into the low 6.9s or even the 6.8s.

This might end up being the last indoor meet I’ll run this year—next up for me is either the Berkeley all-comers or the De Anza Invitational in mid-Februrary back in California.