TIME ON HIS SIDE
moves on.
"Practice is not racing.'' Ahmed has the perfect explanation, too, for his ability to shake off a bad practice. "The end result is not just determined by one or two workouts,'' he said. "It's a whole year, two years, three years, (that goes into it). I've been training really hard every year that I've been here; so all the mileage that I did my first and second years helps this year. It all adds up.'' So does the strategy; the Ahmed strategy that he carries into every distance event. "I was watching him the entire race and he was locked on to Derrick,'' Byrne said of Chris
Derrick, a Naperville, Ill., native and Stanford senior. "Mo un- derstands that Derrick is a great reader of the race, a great tacti- cian. Every move that he made, Mo followed.''
Byrne had armed Ahmed with a game plan. "Mick told me, 'Don't go to the front — stay somewhere in the back, stay out of trouble,''' Ahmed said. "So I stayed in the back and I found him (Derrick) there, too. That kind of reassured me. If I saw him at the front, then I would have thought I
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« Against an elite field, Ahmed kept himself ahead of traffic and ran the sixth- fastest time in the world this year, breaking UW's school record by 30 seconds.
