UMF Track Adventures to New York
Sophomore track and field member Abby Macdonald experiences New York with the UMF track and field team (Submitted Abby MacDonald).
September 26, 2024
Makayla White, Editor
On Friday, Sept. 13, UMF track and field team took on an adventurous journey to the big state of New York to compete in pre-NAC racing.
Sophomore track and field member Abby Macdonald gave a very detailed and exciting description of the events.
“This meet was our pre-NAC, it’s tradition for schools in the NAC to race the course twice in the season. The first time is to familiarize ourselves with the course and the competition and the second time is the championship meet. This year’s NAC race is being held in Delhi, New York, so we will be shipping ourselves there twice this season.”
Abby added “We left around 7am Friday morning, meeting up in Augusta with Husson. We all took one coach bus down since they didn’t bring their full team, so thankfully the bus wasn’t super full. The bus ride itself was super long, but we stopped in Massachusetts where we did our pre-meet run. It was crazy pretty there. We had a picnic (it was Subway) then continued on our drive to New York. We stopped about ten minutes from the hotel, and picked up some Applebees before finally getting to our hotel…like 11 hours after we first took off driving.”
Abby discusses race day. “We woke at 5 in the morning to get ready before heading down for the hotel breakfast at 6. We left at 6:40, went to the golf course the race was being hosted at, and got ready for the race. The women's race began at 9:30, men followed suit. There weren’t any awards so we just had our usual post-race cool downs and a large team meeting. It wasn’t anything big, the usual praise from our coaches, and it wasn’t too long. We quickly got on the bus again with the Husson team and made our way back to Maine. We arrived back in Farmington around 8pm.”
Abby explains how she stayed so positive after all of that driving and car sickness.
“I loved being in a competitive environment. I like that competitive atmosphere, so I felt I was able to produce an okay time for it being the second race of the season.” Though she added, “I get motion sick. We were on a bus for 16+ hours.”
The team performed well, despite car sickness, long rides and not being on home grounds.The men's team won by a whopping 53 points and the women's team ended up in a tie for first place, only placing second by the final tie-breaker.
