California here we come !

Minnow at 'The Well"  checking in

DAY 1;   WOW;  back from Sacramento and the Masters World Championships.  Spent 7 days of delightful track and field experiences following my awesome wife thru her first time stressful valleys and peaks...And what a trip it was...When we arrived on sunday 10th, after an all day drive from Redmond Or-9 hours-checked into the Residence Inn Rancho Cordova and hit Olive Garden then crashed.

Becky Sisley from Eugene

  Up and going on monday we drove 7 min. to Sacramento State and the track stadium , where we were met with a whole lot of fit people in the gate going in thru the sales tent..opening out to bright sunshine and lo and behold track races in progress.  Asking questions as we walked eventually found our way to "The WEll" , registration check in.. Painless, and after a few minutes and questions we had Bettys bib number and several really cool bags that would serve as spike and garb bags with the WMA log on them. we also received our athlete party tickets , something I had missed when I went to the Worlds Swim Championships at Stanford and vowed I would never do that again after hearing of all the great times...  We then searched out the stadium stopping at the clerks tent and finding out how to check in when to check in etc. followed by a trip to the practice field behind the Well building...Thats when it hit "the minnow" all the different languages, Russian, French, Spanish, German , and numerous others we had no idea of---we weren't in Oregon anymore Toto !!  Watching some of these people warm up you could swear that you were at a World Championships of some sort--well I guess we were....from age 35-100 and most were not of different shapes, they were almost all in incredibly svelte shape..One of the requirements of running is that on the back of your jersey you have a bib # also..in Bettys case it said F60 ( Female 60 years of age) comes in handy when you wonder how old someone is, just walk around to their backside and look at their number...especially with the language barrier it came in handy..and there were alot of 'age' surprises...many people who look younger are actually far older than one would expect...speaks well for the sport.  We spent about 2 hours wandering around to the different tents, particularly scoping out where all the porta potties and porta trailers were located in case of stress emergencies which seem to happen with frequency with all masters athletes.. and ran into Becky Sisley who is from the Oregon Track Club as is Betty--Becky and I know each other from the fastpitch softball days in Eugene and she has helped Betty in several of her earlier meets, and always friendly. Becky was also the womens Athletic Director at Oregon  as well as the Softball Coach for the Duck women for several years- not to mention the world champion in hepthalon for her age group...She was excited to see us, but not nearly as excited as Betty to see her as it help to know there was at least one person we knew in this throng of athletes.  After Betty had gotten thoroughly excited, nervous and beyond apprehensive we figured we would leave and take it easy the rest of the day since her first race was the following day at 9 in the morning, figuring she could rest and be ready....after all there were 4900 athletes from 93 countries and she felt they were all going to be running against her--it would get worse...