I awoke from my Anne Frank attic room this morning to sun beams blasting through the skylight window above my sleeping bag. I could tell it was considerably colder than yesterday, which was about 50F. Through the trap door in the floor or ceiling, depending on where you stand, I descended into silence. Not quite silence, Jon was continuing to saw logs, aka snore, in his room. The previous night I was put in contact with Christina, who runs for Amherst College. At noon we were going to meet and tour the campus, workout facilities, and makeshift indoor track. On my walk down Dickenson Street I stopped by WheatBerry and grabbed a couple raspberry croissants. Delicious. Christina played a great tour guide, showing me all of campus. She showed me how to get into the Rec center on my own. Jon and I will be hitting up the weight room later this week to get our lift on. We’ll be heading down to the south, so gotta keep the guns tuned.

Inside the cage, which is where all Amherst sports teams practice in the winter and actually looks like a cage from Jurassic Park, Christina showed me the ‘track’ where the team gets their indoor reps done. It is nearly 170 meters and shaped like an oval if ran on correctly. Lane 2 on the straights, lane 1 for the turns. Christina introduced me to the Amherst Track + Field head coach, Erik “Ned” Nedeau. We had a brief chat about running in the North East and its similarities to Oregon. One word was used many times, trails. Jon and I are scheduling to meet with him for a one-on-one interview. Looking forward to that. 

After lunch at the student lunch hall, I left Christina and some of the other runners from the team to drive west with Jon to North Hampton. Home of Smith College. We are working on a little project about the 5 colleges in the area. Should be interesting. Before dinner we met back up with the Amherst track + field team inside the cage as they were wrapping up a workout of 600m reps. Jon took some cool videos of the team for a later compilation. A huge thanks to the Amherst team, Ned, and especially Christina for helping set it all up. Another thanks to my favorite not exactly Hawaiian, Chelsea for putting me in touch with Christina in the first place.

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Follow our adventures at RunnerSpace.com/Travels! We'll be posting a blog update each day until "RunnerSpace Travels Season 1" is done at the end of June. You can also expect school visits and fun adventures to be posted along the way as we hit up many of the top meets from around the country to provide the RunnerSpace meet coverage we all know and love! Make sure to leave a comment below about this update or post on our guestbook to say hi!