This week's Eye on the SLIAC is with Webster University cross country runner Jayden Perry. He talks about adjusting to the collegiate running season and his love of film making.
THE START TO HIS FRESHMAN SEASON
It's definitely going great. A lot of improvement and it's been an eye-opener to the college season. Everything is fresh and I am just going with the flow right now. There's definitely been some surprises and some challenges. With the jump to the 8K, you definitely feel it. And our season is limited compared to my high school running, when it was almost every week. Now it's spread out and I get more time to grow. But when I do hit those 8Ks, it's like, wow. This is hard. But I'm enjoying it. Loving running cross-country in college. It's definitely an experience you're not even gonna be able to know unless you do it. So I'm really enjoying it. I can definitely see growth and I'm happy to be just competing here and progressing, to even breaking top 5 for a collegiate team.
RUNNING AT A LARGE EVENT
So actually, I have ran in Kentucky before since that is where I come from. But I never competed at the Louisville Classic. Even though it has college and high school. So it felt very familiar. The amount of collegiate runners, I was like, wow. You had to split up into three different categories of how many guys are running and you look in the first category, and you're like if I ran in that then I would have been smoked. I like running in the third one because I was about middle of the pack, but it definitely wasn't like I fell down to middle of the pack. I caught up, I was progressing through each 1K out of the run. I kept climbing so I didn't fall off. And I kept it consistent, and the course was great but definitely not my max yet. I know, I know there's still more in me.
TIME SPENT ON OFF-WEEK
This week I definitely loaded up on the harder stuff. You know, hit it hard Monday, all the way till Thursday, just keeping it consistent hard. And then have a longer run come this weekend. A long run but keep it relaxed, and then kind of transitioning. Now we're in that kind of middle of the season. We're right there almost to postseason, but not quite yet. Just right there, so when we get into that next week, I want to have an open mind, and transition from that. You know, really tempo pace stuff and I'll start getting ready for that fast stuff, but I have my body to heal. I need that time to heal, so this week was hitting it hard, and this weekend, after that long run, I feel like it's kind of like a switch now. We need to take it faster, but smoother, and everything's just gonna work out.
INTEREST IN FILM
Those areas of study have been around ever since I was young. I have loved making videos. I always would post them on YouTube skits or whatnot. I never saw it as a career until a couple of years into high school. I was taking video classes and they offer 3 years of video in my high school. Probably the second half of my sophomore year I was thinking wow, I really enjoy this. My teacher's like, you really have a creative eye for things and you should see where this thing goes. And I'm like, okay. And come senior year I got internships to work at some places to make some ads. I think that's where I want to go. I just want to be in the industry. I don't know where it'll take me yet, but you know. movies, hopefully. That's my big thing. But right now, I'm also, on my free time, I'm doing the Gorlok page. I made one edit for the Louisville Classic. So just doing some videography here at the school for all the sports, and just kind of being open to everything with video.