Tough Week

February 11, 2008

Well, it is that time of year in the midwest where training is pretty tough. With no races in sight, the weather miserable and the grind of running high mileage combined with considerable quality makes it a chore at times. But we have continued to soldier on. I continue to tell the kids that this will be the toughest week we have all year and I believe they are starting to get sick of hearing it!

We have had a really successful training week over the last two weeks, and the host of knee pain problems (5 in total) finally seem to be clearing up. Saturday we met with the Limestone Rockets, a rival conference team (the coach is a good friend of mine), and did a 4-6 mile tempo run together. We thought that it would bring an extra element of competitiveness to the workout as well as give some of the kids who usually run alone, to fast or too slow somebody to share the pain with. This has been my second attempt in as many weeks at doing the long tempo, which I feel is more important than any other single workout a distance runner can do. There is a bit of an art to the tempo run, ecspecially with inexperienced runners who do not know their bodies very well. Most high schoolers know two gears; dog-meat slow and fast as ####. What I am trying to do with the long tempo is find those gears in the middle and sustain it over a longer period of time. Although it is frustrating to watch, I trust that by the end of this summer (in prep for xc) we will have it down.

My running is going as slow as planned. Nothing really exciting to report, just 4-5 miles a day with all the weight room stuff as well. The only exciting bit of news on this end is that I will be going to Florida in two weeks for a little warming up, but being the track junkie that I am, Im thinking about bailing on that so I dont miss our first indoor meet of the season!