A return to the blogosphere

Well, I have no recent races to speak of but I've been advancing my fitness and overall health enough to feel like it's time to record my activities once again.

It has been an interesting transition taking a teaching position and coaching role up in Durham at Oyster River High School. As head coach of the boys' HS team, I helped ferry the team to the New England Championships and help senior Patrick O'Brien stamp his ticket to footlocker Nationals in San Diego this coming weekend. I have to keep reminding myself how rare that second feat is. Patrick was a 9:19 3200m runner coming into the season... which is very good, but not to the caliber of the typical footlocker finalist. Figuring out what style of training helps him to improve was super interesting and he possessed the right porpotions of determination and intelligence to get to the finish line of the regional in 3rd place, well inside what he needed to do. He also set a course record on the NH Meet of Champion's course at 15:03. I think that one will stand for at least  a couple years.

So I've run a bit with the team and I have been out mostly on the trails on the weekends when I'm not coaching a meet. It has been cool to convey my philosophy about training and racing to young runners and see them have success. The saying, "Do as I say, not as I do" totally applies here, as I definitely don't train myself as I train my athletes. When I train myself, I tend to run too hard, too often, and I'm not patient enough to see the bigger picture. Also, I rarely have the patience to properly warm-up or do the PT that comes along with running higher mileage.  Hopefully having recognized these things about myself can force a change as I am now officially 30-years-old and want to experience a few more years of fast running. What do I have, 8-12 years of my best running left? Some guys are not even so lucky. I'm hopeful that the next few years will be ones I look back positively on in terms of running, unlike the past two years of one step forward, two steps back.

The plan from now to the New Year is just to get in steady miles in the 30-40 range with 3 core or strength workouts a week and a long run of 10-12 miles. I'm also going to experiment with some exercises to help straighten out my hips and lower back. With any luck, I'll feel ready to hit the snowshoes when the NH SS GP begins!

Anyway, here goes an attempt at regular blogging.