Sunday Thoughts

Wow, what a rainy, cold disgusting weather day yesterday. I am glad we went home when we did, as the cancelled the entire meet only thirty minutes after we left. I consider the meet a success, no one got injured, everyone seemed realtively healthy when we left, and we didn't lose anything. (Although I think I lost my winter hat, if anyone grabbed a brown and black winter hat, it's mine.)

I am welcoming Spring Break, as I am sure everyone is, but it is not a time to shut everything down. Here is the schedule for all 400 m runners and up for this week:

Sunday--Long Easy Run. If you did not race yesterday, pick up the pace a little bit. If you did, keep it nice and slow. Run for at least 60 minutes, more if you can.

Monday--On Your Own15-20 min. wamr-up, then do 5-6 "tolerators" That is a 200 (about 30 sec.) of running at 400 m pace, followed by 100 m (13-16 sec) running all-out. You should feel and noticeable "shift" when you go from 400 pace to sprint pace. This is a continous 300 m interval. Do 5-6 of them. Then, a 15-20 min cool down.

Tuesday--On Your Own. Same as Sunday. 60 -90 min run, with four to five "pick-ups" thrown in there to mix things up.

Wednesday--Meet at Sierra MS at nine o'clock. We will be doing the famous "Three Minute Eggs" work-out as a team, bring your cross country flats! This when I figure out who is varsity for this upcoming weekend.

Thursday--Meet at Chaparral Track. This is an easy day, a short run and some sit-ups. It is also the lasy day to tell me what events you want to do in addition to your relay events if you qualified for Mt. SAC. Check out the schedule here. Then tell me what other events, up to three, you would like to compete in. It is a long day, look carefully for your race. We will most likely be in the "open" division.

Friday--Meet at Chaparral Track. Short speed day, paper-work day, mental preparation day. A typical Friday before a race.

Saturday--I am pretty sure we meet at CHS at 5:15 for this race, but more details to come.

And lastly, I just want to say how proud I am of ALL of our two milers. Yesterday's performance, starting with Lexi and Katelyn coming within ten seconds of the 5 year old school record; to Josh bouncing back and shaving 30 seconds off of last weeks time; to Alex running a tremendous 10:15, and establishing himself as a hard-core runner in the league; to Steven simply racing, and showing that the two mile is a race of ACTIONS, not RE-ACTIONS. It was great, it was all great. In fact, I take back what I said at the beginning of the post, it wasn't a disgusting day, it was a beautiful day!

Last Names

This is truly how to pronounce my last name, from the old country:

Seppala

Updated "Foot of Rockies" Line-Ups

Below are the updated line-ups for the meet this Saturday in Ft. Collins.

Foot of Rockies Line-Ups, Updated

Also, I am not seeeing as much EFT tapping as I wish I was. It is not something you can just pull out right before a race, it something that needs to be a habit in your lives. It's like horse-breathing. If you horse-breathe before you need it, you won't get cramps while you run. If you just horse-breathe when you feel the cramp it won't help much.

Same with EFT tapping, if you start tapping when you need it, it might not help, if you tap and focus before you need it, that's when you get the amazing benefits. Hey, it's "legal cheating" why not use it?

Good arms!

Good arms!

Preparing for the Foot of the Rockies Invite

This Saturday, we have another early morning departure, and another late evening arrival back in Parker. It is the Foot of the Rockies Invite, and we usually do very well at this venue. Instead of a lot of good schools to compete against from the Springs, we have a lot of good schools to compete against from Ft. Collins.

Here are the distance varsity line-ups for that meet. As you can tell, there are spots that are up for discussion from the coaches. We can inform you about these updates on Tuesday. If you are not going to the varsity meet, you will be competing at the JV meet at C.H.S on Thursday.

The general plan for the week is to run pretty easy and recover from three hard weeks of training and racing. Monday will be a game day, Tuesday is a short easy run. Wednesday will be our only real speed day of the week, as we will be doing our first session of pace intervals. Thursday is another short easy run, and Friday will be some short speed work to wake our legs up.

Remember to keep eating well, drinking well and sleeping well, or you won't get any stronger. This week is designed to help you, but if you don't help yourself (at the dinner table, at the water fountain) then this week will be a waste. Just because the work-outs are easy does not mean you should slack off on your hydrtion, nutrition and sleep habits!!!

Also, on Monday, we will announce who has qualified for Mt. SAC. We have a big contignet going, it should be exciting and fun!

Sep

Personal Bests

I can say that these personal bests are much faster than the personal bests from one year ago! Keep up the great work!

Personal Bests, 3/18/07

Lancer Invite Re-Cap

A very long, very warm, very successful day for CHS distance, in my mind.

After four hours of sleep the night before, (BTW, never go see “The Ataris, very underwhelming in a love setting. But maybe that is because they had already played a free show earlier that day. But, it still sucked.) I was at CHS at 5:20 to get ready to load the bus for the meet. Even though I had very little sleep, I was still excited that we were going to do well in this meet.

Let’s go through each race. We opened the meet with the boys and girls 4 x 800 relay. We won the girls race, with Kelli putting in a fantastic first leg, with a kick that surprised everyone, and Kirsten running her usual winning self to get the meet going with our first win. The boys ran very well two, with two new guys in the middle, and Will running a blazing last leg to get us a point and come in 8^th. Results can be found here.

I made the crucial error in the next race. I simply miscalculated how long it would take to run the 4 x 200, and I warmed the women up for the mile way too early. We warmed up too much, and the temp was increasing rapidly. Even with that coaching error, the women still ran very respectably, all coming close to their PR’s for the season. The boys didn’t make the mistake of “too much warm-up, and they all PR-ed huge, led by Zach coming in 5^th in a time of 4:43. He ran with the big boys to start, by the end of the year, I think he will be finishing with the big boys too. The mile results can be found here.

Later in the day, it was very hot, and I felt the team was a little flat. The half mile was up, and I instructed the girls to run with good form, and not to worry about time. Well, both of them had great form, and both had great times as well. Kelli was 3^rd by a nose, due to the fact that we have done very little speed work so far this year, and Kesley ran awesome to get us an additional point in 8^th. The boys did their part as well, with Zach coming in second in a even-splitted 2:02, and Alex and Taylor finishing strong as well. Results can be found here.

A few minutes after the half mile, the two mile race began. The women, as opposed to the mile, had a perfect warm-up, using ice, shade and GU to get their muscle ready to go. Caroline was in the lead pack the whole race, finishing a fantastic second, and Lexi and Katelyn ran very well as usual, to allow all three of our freshman to score points in the race. The men’s race was a fast race too. Steven ran awesome, especially for this early in the year, to beat his time from this meet last year by almost 20 seconds. This shows his is very physically fit, and he has recovered fully from his shin episode earlier this spring. Josh showed his internal toughness in running with a balky knee, and he and Ethan represented CHS with aplomb.

The last race of the day for the distance contingent was the 4 x 400, and wouldn’t you know it, the two skinny distance runners had the fastest spits of the day. I think yellow shoes can be attributed to that! Results for both the two mile and the 4 x 400 can be found here.

Overall, the girls came in second, and the boys came in third. I am very pleased with these results, because we did not have a lot of our top “stars” for both them boy’s side and the girl’s side. Once we get everyone healthy and healed, I think that our team is going to be one to be reckoned with!!!

Today's Offical Results

Here is a link to the results from today's sunburny meet more commentary, the weekly schedule, new line-ups and updated personal bests are on their way tomorrow!

New Google Tools

This is exactly what I wanted this blog to be able to do. I wanted to be able to post online the meet line-ups, the interval paces, the meet results, every type of data I collect, for everyone to be able to view at their leisure.

My only question, should I post the top-secret work-outs that make our team so great? :) :) :) Nah, not yet.

Here they are:

Updated Pace Times
League Relay Distance Results
Lancer Invite Line-Ups
2007 Personal Bests

So, if you need any info, check the blog!

Mixing Things Up

For this week's meet down in the Springs, I am mixing things up a bit.

I want to have some different people run some different events. Even though I am pretty sure we could score more points if I had kids running their "normal" events, I want to see how kids race when they are not in the event of their strength.

This is being down to build depth on the team in case of injury, to give athletes a break from their normal routine, and to use this meet as training for the more imporant meets later in the year.

I expect everyone to run as fast as they can, no matter what event they are in, of course.