Stuff

I always try to come up with some clever catch for the title - I think the lack of rain has me in the doldrums and I couldn't quite get anything to pop out. Anyway, welcome back!

This was a great first week of practice and I saw a lot of good effort out there. It was a little sultry yesterday afternoon, which makes the running all that much harder. Let me get some administrative stuff out of the way first:

1. Next week, I will be circulating a sheet requesting t-shirt sizes. Please cooperate with us on getting that done, we need to get the order placed as soon as possible.

2. I will submit our roster after next week. If you have not already done so, please make sure of two things - one, the $25 Diocesan Fee (per child) is paid; two, the school health form has been turned in. Coach Vance will let me know that everyone on the roster has the latter...your child cannot run in the meets without it!

3. Here's the schedule for our meets:

Sunday, September 21
Sunday, September 28
Sunday, October 5
Sunday, October 12

All meets will be at the Dominican Campus - where we have our Thursday practices. You must run at least TWO of the first three races to be eligible to run in the last meet, which is the Championship.

4. We will not practice next Thursday due to the Home School Association meeting.

5. I am exploring having an extra practice for our 7th and 8th Graders over a couple of the weekends coming up - more to follow.

OK - here's what the plan is for the next few weeks. Basically we have a month before our first meet. The key elements for effective cross country running are endurance, strength and speed. Overlapping this are flexibility, mental toughness and technique. The emphasis these first three weeks is building our "base" or endurance. Simply put, we are just running - getting our bodies used to going the distance. Once we have that down, we will work on our strength for a few practices and then we will focus on speedwork. The strength portion of the program is made up of hill repeats (always a favorite!) and some course alterations to get tougher grades under our feet. For speed work we will use fartlek exercises...I know, nasty sounding name. Fartlek is a Finnish word that means "speed play." The way I do it is to have the kids run the usual course, but on signals, they have to accelerate for periods of time...then jog, then run etc. Our "sharks and minnows" game is a bi-weekly exercise in speed training. That, combined with kids natural competitiveness, helps the kids get plenty of training at high speed.

So that's the plan!

All for now - I leave you with a link to one of George Sheehan's essays.

Enjoy!

Coach

.