He jokes about what the conditions were like when he was growing up.

“Our old facility was old,” he said. “There’s no other way to label it there, because it was to the point where the track, my freshman year at Houghton, we hosted a couple of meets. My sophomore and junior year, we couldn’t host. We had a track. We couldn’t host, just because it was so bad. Then, my senior year, they ripped it up.”

On June 7, Sayen, along with Houghton High School, U.P. Health System-Portage, and the Copper Country Running Company, will host a community track night at the Houghton High School track at 7 p.m. There will be a youth 400-meter dash, a middle/high school/open and masters 800-meter run and a 1600-meter run.

The entry fee for runners is $5 per race, and admission will also cost $5, with all the proceeds from the event going to the Houghton Gremlins track and field team.

Along with all of that, Sayen, who has earned All-American honors at Michigan Tech, will put on a special exhibition where he attempts to break the one-mile U.P. record.

Five years ago, the high school remade its outdoor complex, including a turf field and a rubber track. The rubber track is typically faster than the older, asphalt tracks that schools used to have, but that also means the track is safer for runners.

“I actually fell in the national championships in the final, and scuffed up my knee pretty bad,” said Sayen. “(It is) still hard, but probably a lot easier on the body than falling on hard pavement.”

Sayen said he came up with the idea of a community track night as a way to give back to the Gremlins track program.

“(As) my final send off for my collegiate career, I want to do something to give back to the Houghton track and field program, because I wouldn’t have gotten this far without them,” he said.

Of course, getting the chance to finally race on Houghton High School’s new track is a huge bonus for Sayen, who practices on the track, but has not had a chance to compete on it.

“I haven’t raced officially on Houghton’s new track yet,” said Sayen. “I’ve never done that because I graduated before they poured it (during) my freshman year at Tech.

“I wanted to do it to give back to the community and show them that just because you’re from a local area, a small local area, doesn’t mean that you can’t reach a certain level. (I want to) show like the young kids in the sport that, hey, you’re not limited just by the area, to show them that it’s possible and that there is a path, and that you can take it and run with it, literally.”

As far as Houghton High School is concerned, Athletic Director John Sanregret is excited to show off the track and the football field to the community at large.

“It would be almost like an added bonus to show the community this is what you’re paying for,” Sayen said. “Some of the people who might come and watch (this event) might not have a reason to go there for their nephew’s, or their grandson’s, track meet or football game. This might be maybe the first time they’ve seen it. I know that John is fired up about that aspect of it, being able to like show it off to like this. This is what you guys are paying for. This is what it can be.”

As far as his attempt at history goes, Sayen and his Huskies’ teammates have done a large amount of research to figure out what the fastest mile ever run in the U.P. was. The fastest record any of them could find was one of four minutes, 12 seconds. So, Sayen believes he can top that.

Sayen got the idea for hosting a community track night from a running group out of Boulder, Colorado, called Tin Man Elite. One of the runners in that group was from a small town in Delaware. The runner organized a professional race in his hometown and attempted a sub-four-minute mile at his former high school track. He was successful in his attempt, as were a few other runners during the race.

With his own personal challenge laid out before him, Sayen is excited about the event.

“I want to do something for them (his teammates, his former high school, and the larger running community in the Copper Country), give them an opportunity to participate in something, to see something that maybe they’ve never seen before, because I’d imagine that most people haven’t even seen a mile remotely as fast as what I’m planning on doing,” he said. “You give back to the program, and provide something for the community to enjoy, and spark the life of running the spring, running early summer, (and) running around here.”

Register link

Those looking to register can go to this web site: https://runsignup.com/Race/MI/Houghton/CommunityTrackNight.