Something surprising happened when we photographed John Soucheck showing off his championship race walking form at Red Bank Regional High School recently: every series of pictures we took caught Soucheck moving in nearly perfect sync with the motor-driven camera shutter.
The result was the appearance of Soucheck gliding across the pavementand always with one foot on the ground.
Maybe that clockwork efficiency is what makes Soucheck so good at his sport. At the 68th annual USA Track and Field National Championship held in Ocean Township earlier this month, the 41-year-old Little Silver resident took third place in the 40-kilometer race walk.
That’s nearly 25 miles, for you metric-phobes. Soucheck covered it in just three hours, forty-one minutes and twenty-two seconds.
On a combined basis, Soucheck and a pair of Shore Athletic Club teammates (one from Spotswood, the other from Orlando, Fla.) turned in the overall best team time, giving them the national men’s title.
Congrats to Soucheck and his teammates.
