Track & Field Report: Pat Henry previews SEC Indoor Championships

Texas A&M Track & Field is preparing to compete at the SEC Indoor Championships on Friday and Saturday at Randal Tyson Track Center in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Head coach Pat Henry joined Tuesday's edition of TexAgs Radio to chat about the season and state of his Aggies.

Key Notes from Pat Henry interview 

• The two facilities in the SEC where you can run a conference championship are Arkansas and Texas A&M. We are one of the only tracks that has enough seating. We’ve got 3,000 seats. Kentucky is building one right now that’s small, a nice track but not enough seating. It’s good for us. I enjoy putting on the conference championships. It’s good for the sport and the community. We will host it next year. It’ll be on an every-year rotation between us and Arkansas. They’ve had it for three years in a row because we were building our new facility.
   
• We’re ready to do what we do. We have very few injuries and problems. If we get it done, it’s because this group is together. They want to be successful as a group, so that’s good to see. Sometimes it’s a momentum thing. Emotions are a huge part of everything we do. It’s like a football team. If something good happens right off the bat, it can waterfall. The same thing happens in our sport. It’s about emotions, so you try to get it going early.
   
• A lot of the information we get is good, but the application is different. You can get information and analytics that’s over your head, but we’ve been dealing with it for a long time. We know how important sleep is. Diets have gotten a lot more sophisticated than in the past, but people can still eat wrong. Overtraining is a huge issue sometimes, but if you look at training, you know when your training is going well. When you’re able to do a workout and know there’s a significant change, you have to go back and look at what you’re doing. If it’s the wrong thing, what can you do even better? Try to start listening to the information you have available. We have to reward ourselves for change. You have to be able to get the best out of yourself. Let’s see what the best effort you can get is.
   
• Things move forward very quickly in this ranking stuff. A lot of it is so subjective. We’ll drop down two or three teams because we didn’t compete last weekend. Now that we get down to this conference championship, then you start seeing the rankings matter. When we get to the national meet, six of the top 10 will be from the SEC. The SEC gets after it. That’s why the conference championship is such a great meet.
   
• What you learn about yourself in the SEC Championships helps you prepare for the national championship meet. Different environments help you go somewhere you’ve never been before. Everybody talks about PRs, but it’s about taking yourself where you’ve never taken yourself – past that pain barrier you weren’t able to go past before. The level of competition elevates everything. You jump to the level of your competition.
   
• I hope we have some good results coming home next week. We’ve got a huge high school meet next week, so I’m excited to do that. We open the door, and they come in.