California, here I come....with all due apologies to Al Jolson, this weekend I am off to sunny California, to race at the Golden West Invitational.

I've been looking forward to this for the longest time as I will be running the 3,200-meters without any other event before it for only the second time in 13 months. And this is really the first totally fresh one I've ever run.

My workouts have been going well and I feel that I am ready to run fast. This race should have some great competition with my future Arkansas teammate, Scott McPherson, in it as well as Luis Medina and Mohamud Ige. Scott and I talked last weekend about sharing the pace so we could both run great times.

The presence of the Californians will help. I've had some great competition locally with a friendly and fierce rival, Tim McLeod. We had two really fantastic races at our Region and State meets and he has pushed me tremendously with my training and in our races. I never forget that some one else is always training but when that person is in my Region it really motivates me to work harder every time I step out the door.

Racing is what keeps me coming back to running every time I run. I get extremely excited about the next time I am going to race. At times it can be nerve racking and I can have the most uncomfortable feeling in my stomach. But it is definitely what I enjoy doing the most -- stepping onto the track, waiting for the gun, racing off, testing myself to see how hard I have trained, and finding what new time my competition can push me to.

As Dire Straits sang, sometimes I'm the windshield, sometimes I'm the bug. Whatever happens in Folsom Sunday night will be great fun -- and very fast. If you're in the neighborhood, drop in. Race time is 8:15. I wish I could run that!!

Hi, my name is Ken Cormier, and sometimes I wonder how I became a distance runner. Since I was asked to write this blog, I guess I'm not the only one who is curious. There are at least two of us, and I hope a few more.

My running addiction more or less started when I went out for track my freshmen year at Douglas High School. My whole life I was a baseball and soccer player -- imagine playing a sport with a ball -- but decided to go out for the track team because I was curious and I always thought track was a pretty cool sport. I didn't start out with the distance corps, but rather with the intermediate hurdlers. I really enjoyed running track because of all the sports I did, it definitely had the best atmosphere in which to work. I looked forward to track practice everyday. After track season ended I decided to run with the distance team over the summer to get in shape so that when track rolled around again I would be able to reach my goal, qualify for state in the 300-meter hurdles, a feat that I missed my freshman year at Regionals. Three went to States. I was fourth.

Over the summer I ran three to four times a week with the cross country team, but I really didn’t become passionate about the sport until I went to the Anasazi training camp in Flagstaff, AZ. I was really lucky to get there. I wasn’t going to go because I was working as a lifeguard and I really just didn’t care, but the day before the camp started cross country coach David Bond called me and told my one of the girls who was supposed to go came down with strep throat and I could go to this camp for free because all of the fees had been paid. So there I was at camp for a week in beautiful, cool Flagstaff. It was so different than Douglas, a very hot place on the Mexican border, two hours southeast of Tucson. The most amazing part to me was how all these runners really loved this sport, how they enjoyed training, all they did was talk about running and it was great! Even though through most of the runs I was dying and just trying to hang on and not be the one that the pack has to slow down for, I really found pleasure in running. It became more then just something to do; it became something I wanted to do.

Okay, to be truthful, it became my obsessive passion. From that time on I knew I was going to be a runner. I didn’t know were I was going, I didn’t know how far it would take me, but I wasn't worried about any of that. I simply decided to run.