Runners Everywhere

This week my 3 season (2nd official) as an assistant cross-country coach started. I always enjoy this time of the year because I get to run with others and really get to know some of my students as athletes and as people. What I really enjoy seeing is the growth that they get to experience as runners in their own right. This years squad should be very interesting we only lost 2 seniors from last year the Boys return all of their section team while the girls return both conference and section squads. As one of their coaches, this makes my job easier because the learning curve is on your side. I don’t have to spend a great deal of time with those older runners because they know what it takes to see success and they will just do what needs to be done. This gives me more time to spend with the younger runners and try to help them on their way to becoming runners.

In addition, this year I am trying to make a much greater effort to run with different groups not just the fast boys as I have done in the past. My training might suffer some but overall I think that I will be a better coach for it. This first week was great I ran part of the first workout with the faster boys, then started back to the slower varsity girls, and then worked my way back up to the slower varsity boys. This worked out great I got to see, and talk too many of the runners and enjoyed it. I did run one full workout with the faster boys and made sure that they pushed the pace when they needed too. Overall this week was great the runners are great (as always) and we have great numbers 46 kids 7-12 (24boys 22girls).
Because many of my runs are with the team now I will at times be forced to run a second time after, practice or even to and from practice to try to keep my mileage up. I will still have my weekends but I will need to make sure that I really work those runs so that I still have the endurance for my marathon in October, because speed should not be an issue since most of the runs will be to train the teams for their races.

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