Black and Gold Fall Practice Meet

 We finally did something normal yesterday!

We had our normal pre season practice meet about 6 weeks later than normal but still 2 months before the start of official practice.  Such is the life in the age of Covid restrictions.

See Results and Splits

See All Time Lists

See All Time Team Time Trial Comparisons

Some Encouraging Results

We had a few big PRs and some really big negative splits.  Joe dropped over a minute from his PR and Taylor moved to #6 on our all time list for the pre season meet! The PRs are an indication of big fitness gains. The negative splits are evidence of fitness that went unused in the race yesterday but is still there available for future use.  If  you PR'ed yesterday, good job! You can be proud of yourself.  If you ran a huge negative split, congrats, your fitness is better than you showed yesterday.

Some Lacking Fitness

Quite a few boys ran major positive splits.  This makes sense.  Your legs remember what it is like to run at race pace, but your hearts and lungs have lost the fitness to deliver enough oxygen to your legs to keep them actually going at race pace. If you ran a major positive split, your task is to gradually build up your mileage and the pace at which you can do tempo efforts over the next 3 months.  Long runs, short sprints, and tempo runs at 70%-80% vVO2 max need to be your office for the next 3 months and you need to punch that clock every day!

Some Wild Cards

We had a big number of athletes not run yesterday due to many reasons (inability to attend, severe lack of fitness, nervousness about a simulated competition).  Bringing the rest of our team  together and starting to re-develop that good feeling we've had for years is going to be of utmost importance.  There was a lot of talent sitting on the sidelines yesterday.

Another wild card is the fact that when we bring students back on campus finally, we'll have a chance to start talking to freshmen about our team.  Not only is bringing in new freshmen important for the future, but we often  have kids show up who can make an impact on our team's success right away.  The successful (or unsuccessful) recruitment of freshmen will have an impact on our team this year and for years to come, so let's make sure we're talking to those kids in our classes about how awesome it is being on this team!