Last Saturday, while many Yalies were still enjoying the break, the men’s track team was up and running. In their first meet after five weeks off, the Bulldogs competed against 15 other teams from the northeast in the 28th annual Yale Intercollegiate Track Classic hosted at Yale’s Coxe Cage. Like the team’s previous meet, the Classic was unscored, giving the athletes an opportunity to see where they’re at in their training and gauge themselves against competition.

“It’s our meet coming back from vacation so we only had two to three days of official practice before heading in,” Yifan Chen ’12 said. “It was more like an assessment of where we are other than a full-fledged competition.”

Competition or not, Chen took third in the triple with a personal record of 13.17 meters, cutting approximately six inches off his previous best. His performance was complemented by a number of strong displays in the other field events with Samba Binagi ’11 finishing sixth in the same event (12.14m). Reynold Holmes ’10 took second in the long jump with a distance of 6.92 meters and Tommy Winger ’13 finished eighth, jumping 6.56 meters.

In the throwing events David Smith ’11 and Mike Levine ’13 also placed high for the Bulldogs with Smith finishing second in the shot put with 14.71 meters and eighth in the weight throw with 13.96 meters. Levine was fourth in the weight throw with a personal record of 16.01 meters and 11th in the shot put with 12.25 meters.

While the field events took place inside the track, the sprinters were circling them on the track. Matt Bieszard ’12 finished the 400-meter dash in a time of 49.37 seconds, which, he said, is a great time at this point in the year, good enough to win his heat and place third overall.

“I’m happy with the 400,” Bieszard said. “People were coming at me, left and right, so I sucked it down and turned it up at the end to win my heat, outrageous fun.”

In the 60-meter dash, Holmes also won his heat in the preliminaries and placed seventh in the finals with a time of 7.14 seconds while teammate Nathan Molina ’11 was tenth in 7.22.

The 4×800-meter relay team of Ted Galligan ’10, Remi Ray ’10, Marty Evans ’11, and Alex Harris ’10 finished in fifth to match their performance from last year while the 4×400 team of Josh Fuller ’13, Bieszard, David Soiles ’10, and Molina finished in seventh.

In the distance events most of the cross country runners are still taking time off to recover. Chris Ramsey ’13, who didn’t compete in cross country this year, was back however, and finished fourth in the 800-meter run with a time of 1:59.44. Kevin Brown ’10 also competed taking 10th in his heat of the 3,000-meter and 15th overall in 8:57.34.

“I didn’t compete in cross country so I didn’t have to come back from all that heavy work like some of those guys did,” Ramsey said. “This was kind of the plan for me all along, to start early in indoor.”

The rest of the distance team will be back in time for the next meet, to be held on Jan. 23. The Bulldogs will travel to Hanover, N.H., to compete against Dartmouth and Columbia, a meet where they have been undefeated for a number of years.

“It is our first scored meet,” Ramsey said. “So it’s kind of an all hands-on-deck thing, everyone will be trying to rack up as many points as possible.”