Some good stuff on Flanagan, Lagat, and Midles...

The track season is well underway, and as always, good stuff is crossing the desk and laptop at paulmerca.blogspot.com.

With about three weeks to go before the USA Cross Country Championships in Spokane on February 13th, Joe Battaglia of Universal Sports writes that 2008 Olympic 10000 meter bronze medalist Shalane Flanagan (left/photo by Paul Merca), who won the US half-marathon title in her debut over the distance in Houston on January 10th (1:09:39), is hinting that she may show up in Spokane and contend for the national harrier title.

Flanagan won the 2008 USA championship in San Diego in her last cross country race.

Flanagan is now coached by Jerry Schumacher, the former University of Wisconsin mentor now working alongside Alberto Salazar at the Nike Oregon Project in Beaverton.

You can read Battaglia's article here.

Washington State graduate and 2009 world championship silver medalist at 5000 meters Bernard Lagat announced that he'll participate in the Reebok Boston Indoor Games on February 6th at the Reggie Lewis Center, where he'll face Olympic & World Championship teammate Galen Rupp in the 5000, as well as Bekana Daba and Ali Abdosh, two sub-13:00 5000m runners from Ethiopia. While Lagat holds the US indoor records at 1500m, the mile and 3000m, Rupp is the US indoor record holder at 5000m, having set the current record of 13:18.12 last February.

You can read the full release here.

Next is a series of questions fired at University of Washington senior hammer thrower Zack Midles, a graduate of Capital HS in Olympia.

Midles placed third in the hammer at the Pac-10 meet last year, and is aiming for a conference championship in that event this season.

He says, "Obviously you want to go into every meet with the mindset to win, but realistically I do think that I have a good chance of winning Pac-10's this year in the Hammer. I placed third last year and the year before and we have a couple seniors graduate, so that's probably the main goal right now. Then NCAA's it will be nice because I'll be in Eugene and I'll be really close to home and family will come down and support me and hopefully I will do really well there. My dad (Dwight, who competed for Washington State in the 1980s) placed fourth at NCAA's , so if I could place higher than that that would be ideal. But obviously winning NCAA's is always the goal and just try and do what God can give you."

You can read the full interview here.