Including both indoor and outdoor, the college track and field season is roughly six months long.

    It’s grinding and taxing and even for sprinters, it’s a marathon. Coaches carry out carefully planned training sessions so their athletes can physically peak at precisely the right moment.

    And that moment is a point in time each sprinter, thrower, jumper and distance runner prepares for, for months on end. An entire season, year or career’s worth of effort, toil and preparation can be validated or seemingly wasted with a blink of an eye.

    For Chloe Palakovich, it all came together in the 2012 Big Sky Championships.

    Palakovich, a distance runner for Idaho State women’s track and field team, had repeatedly straddled the line of winning an individual title in the 800-meter race since she arrived at ISU via Whitehall, Mont.

    As a freshman, she placed sixth in both indoors and outdoors. Her sophomore year, Palakovich was third indoors and fifth outdoors. And then as a junior, she took second at the indoor championships.    

    She was runner-up to Weber State’s Amber Henry by .76 hundredths of a second.

    “I just really wanted to run the best race I could. (The plan) was to hang on until the last 300 and then out-kick her, but it didn’t work out. I was just glad that I hung on, ran as hard as I could.”

    Palakovich joked that she must have pushed Henry to the brink because, “For the 3,000 she looked pretty tired,” where she took fourth place.

    Palakovich’s distance coach, ISU assistant Brian Janssen, had a gameplan entering that 800 and it came up just short.

    He had another one for the outdoors’ Big Sky Championships last March in Bozeman, Mont.

    “Always his game plan was to be in the top three-ish ... and then in the last 200 meters, just break out. Because we’d working so much on speed that entire season.”

    For weeks leading up to the Big Sky Championships, Janssen had Palakovich concentrating on her speed to the point that she had not run more than 300 meters in practice for weeks.

    “I was starting to get kind of nervous,” Palakovich said. “I (felt) like I would have no endurance for the 800.”

    Ah, but the plan of a coach.

    In the finals, Janssen’s training and Palakovich’s dedication paid off. She ran a career best 2 minutes, 9.63 seconds and outpaced the field to win her first individual Big Sky championship.

    “It was really exciting and I think it was most exciting because I finally ran the race that Brian (Janssen) had been wanting me to run all season,” Palakovich said.

    Now, seven months later, Palakovich, a senior, is beginning to prepare for her final indoor season.

    How can she claim her first indoor title?

    First, she built a base in cross country this past fall — finishing an Idaho State best 12th in the Big Sky Championships — and Janssen will begin focus on her speed and endurance as the season progresses.     

    “We have our base from cross country and we have our speed,” Palakovich said. “We just have to be able to hold that for an 800.”

    The indoor Big Sky Championships in Bozeman, Mont., are months away. Palakovich knows it’s a process of preparation. Idaho State track and field hosts the Snake River Open Jan. 11.