By MARK MOSCHETTI
Seattle Pacific Sports Information
 
SEATTLE – No wonder Justin Ramsey is a sprinter.
 
His whole day probably feels a lot like that.
 
At 5 a.m., even when many of the most dedicated students – or athletes – are still catching a few more minutes of precious sleep, Ramsey is up and going.
 
No time for track training at that early hour, though. That'll come much later in the day.

For now, Ramsey is busy "having my coffee and my Trader Joe's breakfast," and then hitting the road for the drive to Shorewood High School, some 12 miles north of SP . Once there, he'll spend the day teaching world history to sophomores.
 
Then, he'll come back to campus and join his teammates for practice at Wallace Field.

 

"I've been doing that for the past four months," Ramsey said just before heading down to the track to continue with preparations for this weekend's Great Northwest Athletic Conference Championships. "It has been extremely busy."
 
And how. In addition to teaching and track, he still has some classes on campus, is working on a project to get his teacher certification, and, as an honors student, is polishing off his undergraduate thesis.
 
"It took some time to adjust and to find some compromise," he said, "and figure out how to do things to the best of my ability without stretching myself too thin."
 
For the next couple of days, Ramsey gets to turn most of his focus to racing, as he and the Falcons head to Western Oregon University in Monmouth for the Great Northwest Athletic Conference Championships. Competition begins on Friday at WOU's McArthur Field at 2:00 p.m. for field events, and 2:45 for running events. Saturday's schedule has field starting at 10:00 a.m., and track at 12 noon.
 
Ramsey's name is on the heat sheet in three places: the 4x100 and 4x400 relays, and the 400-meter dash.
 
That last one has been his favorite for a long time. He's the No. 11 seed coming into the meet with his personal-best mark of 49.54 seconds from last Saturday's Ken Shannon Invitational at the University of Washington. Last year, he earned a spot in the GNAC finals, ultimately finishing eighth.
 
Ramsey would like to cap his career with an even better finish, but understands that nothing is guaranteed.
 
"It's always a combination of fitness and injuries and people running to the best of their abilities," he said. "If everyone were to run PRs, I wouldn't make finals.
 
"But it comes down to how well you can race," he added. "Last year, I made finals by a tenth of a second (after coming in as the No. 10 seed), and that was not expected. I think I could do something similar this weekend."
 
THINK ABOUT IT – THEN JUST GO FOR IT
One lap around the track. Seems simple enough, right?
 
But for those who know better, a lot of planning goes into that one lap – especially when trying to run it as fast as possible.
 
With his 3.71 grade-point average, it's no surprise that Ramsey can take an intelligent approach to figuring out the best – and fastest – way to run it.
 
"There's always a balance in being calculated in what you and not thinking too much," he said. "You want to act on instinct – but you want to have the right instinct."
 
As his career has evolved from his freshman year in 2014 toward this weekend's final races as a Falcon, Ramsey's calculations are meeting up with the right instinct more and more frequently.
 
His best time during his first college season was 52.73 seconds, and he did not qualify for GNAC. As a sophomore in 2015, Ramsey started with a 52.84 – a definite improvement – and got it all the way down to 51.20 by season's end.
 
He opened the spring of 2016 with a 50.35. Finally, on April 9 of that year at the Emilie Mondor Invitational on the Simon Fraser campus in Burnaby, B.C., Ramsey broke through the 50-second barrier, clocking 49.86.
 
As he came off the track that day, he was embraced by several teammates.
 
"This is what I've been working for since I started track, especially since I started running the 400 my freshman year in high school," the Colorado Springs native said afterward. "So it feels good to train for however many years this has been to finally break through that barrier."
 
Ramsey has logged a pair of sub-50s this year, both career-bests: 49.65 at the Bryan Clay Invitational on April 14 in Azusa, Calif., and 49.54 last Saturday at the UW's Husky Track.
 
"Practice plays a big part," he said. "In the race, you run that first 200 a couple seconds or a second and a half faster than the second 200. … It's being "properly reckless" – you just go for it and trust your fitness. That's something the coaches have been encouraging me to do: Don't hold back. I'm fit enough to do it. Just go out and run strong, and focus on not tightening up."

 

Assistant coach Audra Smith, who works with the Seattle Pacific sprinters, isn't shy about pointing to Ramsey as someone who has done it right.
 
"He has the story that a lot of people want to have in their career," she said. "He has a great work ethic. After his freshman year, he was able to see what it was going to take to commit to start breaking some personal goals and have some competitive times on the track."
 
TIMING WAS EVERYTHING
While a senior at Coronado High School in Colorado Springs, the Seattle area was on Ramsey's radar for college.
 
But Seattle Pacific wasn't on that radar. He was looking at another school, both for academics and for track, when he got a letter from SPU inviting him to apply for a Distinguished Scholar Award. It's a full-tuition scholarship, only five are available …
 
… and it's extremely tough to win one.
 
"The letter said they were having a scholarship competition the same weekend that I happened to be up in Seattle anyway," Ramsey recalled. "So I said that I might as well extend my trip for a day."
 
Right place, right time. Ramsey got a call a few days later letting him know that he was indeed one of the five recipients.
 
"It was like, wow – I hadn't even visited SPU," he said. "I flew up later in April, and fell in love with the campus and the people here. It's the best choice I've ever made. It has been awesome. The community, the city itself, competing … I wouldn't trade it for anything."
 
Matter of fact, Ramsey takes a similar approach to life in general. Everyone, at some point, would like a do-over.
 
But as he puts it, "Sometimes, you could do something different, but then you miss out on the process. Obviously, we all have ups and downs – freshman year, I ran a second slower than high school, and that was disappointing and discouraging.
 
"But to have the process of getting better, making finals (last year) and breaking 50 seconds – that was the proudest moment of my life. To see that transformation and have the opportunity to be here and have people who support me … I couldn't imagine doing it over again any different way."
 
THE LAST LAP
Depending on job opportunities, Ramsey said he wouldn't mind staying in the Seattle area and even continue teaching at Shorewood if something should happen to come available there.
 
First up, though, is one final weekend of track. If things go right, he'll get a chance to be in the 400-meter finals on Saturday. But regardless of what happens in that race, there's this: Ramsey is the anchor runner on SPU's 4x400 relay.
 
That's the last race of the meet – and he'll be the last Falcon on the oval, running one final lap as fast as he can.
 
"The 4-by-4 was always my high school coach's favorite event," he said. "As a freshman, they invited me to be on there. The feeling of being part of a team and carrying a baton on the 4-by-4 was the greatest honor."
 
But then, a guy like this treats all of his opportunities as an honor. Whether it's teaching, running, studying or polishing off that last project, Justin Ramsey is racing between lots of opportunities during any given day.
 
No wonder he's a sprinter.