Saturday didn’t turn out to be Tristan Shelgren’s day.
The St. John’s Prep senior, fresh from a victory two weeks ago in the Northeast Foot Locker cross country race, got off to a good start Saturday in the national championships at Balboa Park in San Diego. But something happened early in the race that threw him off-stride, and he faded from that point on, finishing 39th out of 40.
“I don’t know what it was,” said Shelgren, who will run at North Carolina next year. “I was feeling good through the first mile (the race was 5K). I was either in first or second going through that first mile.”
Then, there was a hill, “and I felt good going up,” he said. “But when I was going down, I started having trouble breathing. And then my legs started getting weak.
“I fell behind,” he said, “and I kept falling farther and farther back.”
He just chalked it up to a bad race.
“I’m really not sure what happened,” he said in a phone interview from San Diego. “It just wasn’t a good race. Sometimes you have good days, and sometimes you have bad days.”
He plans to put it behind him as quickly as possible.
“I’ll take a week off from training,” he said, “and then I’ll get back to the winter season. I hope to win the New Englands in the mile again, and hopefully I can go on from there.”
He admits that the 75-degree weather in San Diego was a little warm for his preference. When he found out it was snowing back in New England, “I’d rather have had it snow out here,” he said. “I’m more used to that this time of the year.”
When Shelgren gets out to North Carolina next year, he plans on running track all three seasons, the same way he’s done at St. John’s.
