This spring, sophomore Evan Vaslow made his biggest commitment ever.  He decided that he would train to run a 10 mile race. Vaslow spent his spring on a strict training program pushing his body everyday to run the race, training for 12 weeks for the event.

Vaslow began running cross country the summer of sixth grade.  From the first day of practice, Vaslow’s passion grew for the sport.  He ran cross country all through middle school and he enjoyed it so much he started freshman year in high school.  He trained all of his freshman year and loved his first season on the team. He decided to run the 10 mile race to help him for this upcoming season.

“My mom one night suggested the idea of possibly doing a 10 mile race, I was at first scared by the distance of 10 miles,” Vaslow said.  “But I decided maybe I would try it because it might help me in the cross country season to build endurance.”

It is evident that Vaslow was thinking ahead about the cross country season and how this race could help him achieve his goals in the upcoming season.  By furthering his race distance, he was able to make big improvements over the summer to better his times for the upcoming season.

“I went online to find a training plan for a ten mile race, the training program was over twelve weeks, I ended up running 45 different runs in the month of March I ran five days each week, some weeks six days a week,” Vaslow said.  “It was mix of long runs, easy runs, and I mixed in some speed runs so I could be fast.”

Vaslow wasn’t taking this race lightly.  He was working most days a week so he could run his best race possible.  Vaslow wanted to be able to better his times by significant margins over the summer and training this much was the best way to do it.  He was able to get much better over the summer which was evident in the first cross country meet where Vaslow dropped his time by over four minutes.

On April 6, Vaslow ran the race in just under one hour and thirty minutes. Vaslow was competing against four other runners in his age group and he placed second out of them.  During the interview Vaslow expressed that he was pleased with his time and place, even though he feels as he could have been up there for the win.  Vaslow also told me that he would love to run marathons in the future but would need more practice before he is ready for that.