PIAA TRACK

Penns Valley runner eyes state medals

Gordon Brunskill

SPRING MILLS — When it comes to distance runners, preparations can be a little different from your standard track and field athlete.

CDT file photo/Michelle Bixby

Penns Valley distance runner Matt Brooker has found creative ways to train in his quest for a PIAA championship.

View larger

Matt Brooker and a few friends went for a couple laps around Colyer Lake on Wednesday as one of his last workouts before the PIAA Track and Field Championships.

There wasn’t a single step on a rubberized oval for the Penns Valley senior.

The run concluded a heavy workload this spring as Brooker aims to bring back one, and maybe two, medals from the state championships, which get underway at 9 a.m. Friday at Shippensburg’s Seth Grove Stadium.

Brooker and two dozen other athletes and relay teams will be stepping onto the track, runways or throwing circles in the hunt for Centre County’s first state track titlist since Bald Eagle Area’s Connor McGee won gold in the shot put in 2006.

Most of those competitors, in addition to their time in weight rooms, spend most of their time on tracks or in their throwing areas.

For distance runners, all the world is a training ground. From downtown sidewalks to quiet rural roads, up and down mountains, through farmers’ fields — and around lakes — distance runners use it all.

The run around Colyer Lake, a small body of water near Tusseyville and Potters Mills in Potter Township, was a celebration of the work of Hobart Kistler, whose younger brother Peter is also a Penns Valley distance runner. Hobart Kistler’s senior project was to complete a 2.2-mile hiking trail around the lake’s perimeter, and the Rams runners wanted to take a couple trips around the path.

“We just thought it would be a fun time to go out running,” Brooker said Wednesday afternoon, anxious to hit the trail.

The lake run, which had a few random sprints thrown in during the jog, is hardly standard, but it fits with what Brooker did to prepare for this point in the season. A year ago, Brooker was averaging about 30-40 miles per week, but by the middle of this spring he had increased the workload to about 70 miles a week, with some lighter weeks here and there.

Needless to say, if all those miles were done on a track, Brooker would probably be falling asleep on his feet.

Also, in the last few weeks, Brooker threw in some speed interval training — on the track — with runs specifically timed at various distances like 200 or 400 meters in various steps. And did we mention the occasional two-a-day training sessions?

“My dad makes some crazy workouts,” Brooker said. “He just seems to know exactly what you need.”

Coming up with those plans is Penns Valley boys’ head coach Scott Brooker, who has coached numerous middle-distance athletes on a national level and is a USA Track and Field certified coach in sprints and hurdles.

“The bottom line is you’ve got to have a good base,” Scott Brooker said. “You’ve got to run faster than race pace, you’ve got to run at race pace and you’ve got to build your base.”

The work has gotten Matt Brooker qualified for the 1,600 and 3,200 meters — one and two miles — this weekend. He will run the 1,600 preliminaries a little after noon Friday, then run the 3,200 final around 9 a.m. Saturday before hopefully running in the 1,600 finals early Saturday afternoon.

He is realistic with all those laps he may not have a chance to win in both, but he hopes to be high on the medal stand in his preferred 3,200.

“The one-mile’s too fast,” Brooker said. “There’s a lot more strategy in the two-mile. There’s eight laps. Stuff can happen.”

Brooker will graduate with school records in both events along with the Penns Valley course record in cross country. He and his Rams teammates — the entire team of five— finished 13th at the PIAA cross country championships last fall.

Then, after taking a couple weeks to rest up, he will start listening to some new advice. Bucknell head coach Kevin Donner will be giving Brooker his plans for the summer in preparation for running with the Bison this fall.

“It’s going to be great that he’s going away to college and he’ll have different coaching influences and a different athletic environment,” Scott Brooker said.

Matt Brooker simply hopes all those miles, on whatever surface, pays off with a medal hanging around his neck this weekend in Shippensburg.

“Hopefully I can be up there with them,” Matt Brooker said. “I’ll just run as hard as I can.”