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St. Louis Track Club Men's Elite Mile TOMMY SCHMITZ
1. Tommy, you are having an amazing 2009 so far. I think most would definitely call it a breakthrough season. You ran a 4:00 mile indoors and qualified for US Nationals and you've already broken four minutes outdoors. To what do you attribute all this success? I really attribute it to my support system I have set-up. There are many people that have my "back." I have surrounded myself with people who believe in me and believe that I have the talent that is necessary to race with the best. The biggest reasons for my drop in times have been staying healthy and training hard. At the end of the day, the more you run the better you get. It's that simple. I have taken out all the complicated training calculations and just went back to old school type training. 2. You are certainly a role model for those guys and girls who may not have had stellar college careers but want to stick with it post-collegiately. What do you think you've learned since graduating and is there anything you would have done differently while you were at Marquette? I wouldn't have gotten injured as much. :) I think I knew that I could run sub 4 for the mile out of high school but I wanted it then; not in a few years. I trained way too hard before I was ready to. If there was advice that I could give to HS and early-collegiate athletes is that you should try to get better each day. Each day that you get better you move closer to your goals. But nobody ever ran fast without hard work. You should always have your big goal but make sure you have smaller ones that are more easily attainable so as to not get discouraged. Another big thing that I learned was that across all sports, the best athletes know the most about their sport. So I have spent hours learning as much as I can about running which has in-turn made me a better runner. It's a great field and it will be a very exciting race. If the weather holds and the rabbits do their job, I think there easily could be 5-6 guys under 4 minutes. As far as strategies I haven't given it a ton of thought, but I plan on giving it my all.
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West County |
honored to be invited to participate. It is a chance to see some great friends and to run a fast time under the St. Louis lights. 
