It felt like spring but looked like breakup Saturday when the track and field season officially opened in Anchorage.
High temperatures and sunshine made for perfect conditions at West High if you ignored the obvious: Runners sprinting on an oval surrounded by snow and shot putters throwing in a parking lot covered by gravel.
For West High freshman Isabella Dannenberg, it felt glorious to be outside after practicing indoors for much of the preseason.
"We've been practicing outside for the past week, and it feels much more freeing to do it outside," she said. The air is cooler and the space is less constricting, she said.
Dannenberg is a high jumper and hurdler, and neither event is a good indoor pursuit. High jumpers must often shorten their approach, she said, and hurdlers must make do with simple drills limited to one or two hurdles.
Bartlett senior Dylan Bryan, who competes in shot put and discus, said he prefers throwing indoors at The Dome. The air flow indoors is less disruptive to the flight of a discus, he said, but The Dome isn't an option this season: The air-supported sports facility collapsed under heavy snow in January.
Not that Bryan was complaining as he sat in the bed of a pickup during a break between his two events, the sun shining brightly over the dusty parking lot.
He placed fourth in the boys discus with a throw of 114 feet, a personal-best by 2 feet.
Dannenberg also enjoyed a personal best. She cleared 4 feet, 10 inches, a height she had never attempted before. She knocked down the bar on all three attempts at 5-0, but felt good about her day.
"I haven't done it a lot," she said. "I broke my nose doing high jump last year."
Dannenberg said she was injured when she kneed herself in the face in the landing pit. A multisport athlete who also plays soccer in the spring, Dannenberg had to wear a face mask the rest of the season.
At this point, Anchorage's track teams are ahead of the soccer teams. While soccer teams didn't get permission from the school district to clear snow off their turf fields until midway through last week, most track teams have been able to conduct at least some of their practices outside.
"We've had practice on our track for two weeks," Service freshman Stephanie Leigh said. "We had our track snowblowed."
Soccer players, meanwhile, are putting in manual labor in an effort to get outdoors. The Anchorage School District, which is afraid snowplows and snowblowers will damage the artificial turfs, on Wednesday gave three schools the go-ahead to clear their soccer fields using plastic shovels.
One of those schools is Service.
"Our soccer teams are out there shoveling," Leigh said. "We practice while they're shoveling."