During the weekend, the women’s multi-event track athletes headed out to Tucson, Ariz., to compete in the Jim Click Invitational, where it was the first event of the outdoor season for some athletes.

Heading into the meet, multi-event coach Pete Herber had already thought up expectations he wanted to see from his athletes as some of them were competing outdoors for the first time.

“[We] just wanted to get the kids some experience,” Herber said. “It’s a pretty young group that we have. It was a first time for two of the girls and a first time for one of the guys.”

Of the six athletes that went down to the invite — three women, three men — only three had competed in an outdoor multi-event meet before.

After day one of events, Iowa State’s Kelly McCoy was leading her team in the women’s heptathlon with 2,806 points. After the weekend’s events had unfolded, McCoy finished 21st with 4,458 points.

After all of his runners had competed, Herber said he knows where he wants to take his athletes in training before the next outdoor meet.

“We obviously have work to do,” Herber said. “But I was really happy with the way [the athletes] went out and competed. It’s that time of the year where we have to fine-tune some things.”

Herber said he wants to work on execution not only in meets, but in practice as well. Fixing mechanics in practice will lead to results in the meets, which in turn, will help build confidence as the athletes progress in the season.

The next multi-events meet Herber and his team will compete at will be the Mt. SAC Relays in mid-April.

For those runners who didn’t make their voyage out to sunny Arizona, some athletes had a race-day simulation while others worked on basic performance and training.

“[Saturday] is the longer run and it all just flows right into next week,” said assistant coach Travis Hartke on Friday. “We have this pre-meet workout that we’ll do on Tuesday.”

For sprinters this past weekend, they had a race-day simulation to put that kind of atmosphere into their practice.

“Saturday is supposed to simulate a race day, so we’re doing practice in spikes, 300 [meters] over hurdles, a full recovery and a few fast 150 [meters],” said sprinter Kianna Elahi earlier last week.

For the distance squad, it will fly out on Wednesday to Palo Alto, Calif., for the Stanford Invitational, and the rest of the team will head back to Tempe, Ariz., for the Sun Angel Invitational this weekend.