A few weeks ago I competed in my first pentathlon. A pent is just like a heptathlon, but it is contested during indoor track and has two fewer events. Over the course of one meet, I would compete in five track events, each one 20-30 minutes apart. That weekend, the rest of the team was at other meets, so I invited my friend who doesn’t know anything about track along with me. How I convinced her to spend 5 hours of her Friday at a track meet with me is beyond me, but she was happy to come.
The great thing about inviting someone who knows nothing about track to a meet is that they think everything you do is impressive, especially when you do everything. For example, she picked up my shot put (which weighs 8.8 pounds) and said, “This is so heavy. You throw this?!” It made me feel super hardcore.
The first event in the pentathlon is the hurdles. The race went off at 5:30, and my last race didn’t start until 8:30. The whole thing was 3 hours of warming up, competing, cooling down, and then warming up again. Even though it’s important to know how to prepare for each event without tiring yourself out, it is equally important to know how to eat. Even if I’m just sitting in class, I can’t go longer than 2 hours without eating, it just makes me hangry. During an athletic competition, that just gets magnified. Luckily, my mom had sent a loaf of pumpkin bread, so in between the high jump and shot put (the best time for eating), I had a slice. Or two.
photo credits to Jocelyn Martinez
The second to last event was the long jump, which is arguably one of my favorites. There’s nothing like getting sand all up in your uniform to spice up the night. But the feeling of jumping a really good jump is really cool. If you get everything right, you hit this point where you think “wait, I haven’t touched the ground yet. Where is the ground?” and right when you start to panic about finding the ground, the sand is right there and you have a really good mark. I didn’t find that really good mark in this particular meet, but that’s not really the point of the pentathlon. When you’ve already been competing for several hours it’s just about finishing.
There was one other thing about this meet that was special, other than it being my first pent. I knew before the meet that I had a shot at the school record. It was a pretty good mark; the athlete who held it was so famous for having one of the longest planking records that Coach had named a core lift after her. She is strong and fast, and it was going to be a tough record to break. By the end of the meet however, I had done it; I had my very own school record. A week later, I broke it again.
bonus photo taken after my second pentathlon with my high jump/sprints teammate