MASTERS WEEKEND RACES AND RUNS

should typed :

Friends I have made along the way

And I left off Sierra College, what a fantastic course

Was out of town for work in Asheville NC but spent most of the time in a hotel working. Treadmill runs, but hey thats better then where I was.

I was a later comer to XCountry and never ran it till my 40s and loved it. So for me it was very hot training in Annapolis with Scott Eden and his group. Saw young Centro running a few times with his sister. Good group.

Pete,

Thanks to you and your crew for the " drill baby,drill" video clip. Great advice; fluid and fun. Hah!

Started the week off with a 5 mile hilly race at tempo effort. Ended with my best mileage week in almost 6 years of 67.5 miles.

My best story about XC happened my junior year of high school. I was leading our league meet at 2 miles by 15-20 seconds. A little after that, an official realized that the spectators where standing in front of a pylon that I should have went around and I was stopped and told I had to run back around the pylon or get a dq. I did that and took off at a sprint passing the slower runners like they were standing still. The 2.5 mile course ended up being long and I did everything I could to catch up but I ran out of time. My teammate won 10 seconds ahead of me and I finished one second from 6th in 7th place. Back in the day you had to be top 5 for all-league!! That was and still is the hardest I have ever run in a race.

It's funny, when I can start to smell cut grass I start thinking about cross, then the leaves start to have that aroma that just makes you know XC season is here. Best time of my life where each fall of my HS years. Great comradery, and just the pure essence of running.

I'll never forget my introduction to the sport in seventh grade and that first race, Tom McDonald if you ever read this I can still picture you out sprinting me. :)

Great times. Decent week, funny how these energy levels ebb and flow right now. Just easy running, did have a good hilly run over 9miles on Monday, but just enjoyed a pretty week here in the South.

Loved the drill video Pete, good stuff there to try. Auf and Running continues to impress, congrats on another great finish in the 15k.

Re: Chapter 1 - Would have to be my first XC season in '74.

Sophomore year in HS. Went to Vanny for the first time with the Varsity. Probably was Manhattan Invitational.

During the prerace jog over the course, I remember asking my older teammates why certain trees had paint marks on them. They told me that's where a runner died in a previous race. I BELIEVED them ! (hey, I was a sophomore)

So gun goes off...250 sprinting mental patients head for a small opening in the woods only a couple hundred yards away. Once in the woods, all I care about is staying in the middle of traffic and away from those trees and the "cliff" towards the end of the backwoods. My race and time meant nothing to me. Just wanted to survive !

Aaaahhh, sophomores...idiots.

Re: Chapter 2 - To this day, I still feel I went out too fast in almost every XC race I do (including yesterday in NJ Champs). The difference is..back then, I would panic...now, I just "offer it up" (it's a Catholic school thing).

With apologies to MF, I'm stealing chapter two and sending it out to the HS kids I coach today. It doesn't get any better than that.

I won't ask for Chapter #3 because 1 & 2 were such fine pieces of art; but you know we want it.

hi

had a fair week. did some drywalling on monday, which for some reason really hurt my hips. runs through the week were tight and iffy. sunday i ran the lewis & clark half with a 74. official results show 75 and change, but they took us a quarter-mile off course in the front.

i'm pleased with my fitness right now, it just seems like i'm getting all kinds of weird aches and pains all the time...

Drills once a week? I started (seriously this time) doing drills about 6 weeks ago in hopes of better handling turns on the indoor track next season. I was doing many of those in Pete's video, plus several others, but 3x per week. Plus my 2x week track sessions and a long run. Maybe that's why I started feeling worn down 3 weeks later? I've since cut back to once/week the past two weeks. Skipped Saturday's XC meet at GGP.

My favorite XC memory was state regionals my senior year. It was a wet, rainy, sloppy day but I ran the race of my life. Had 2 guys slip & fall right in front of me coming down the hill at Akron's Goodyear Park. I hurdled them cleanly and kept going. Finished second for the team (was usually the 3-4 guy) and qualified for State the next week.

Of course, at State I had the flu and finished 88th.

Favorite cross-country memory for me: Freshman year, my very first XC invitational - the Alleghany Invite. I had no expectations going in whatsoever. My coach told me the field was a good one with two previous State AA champions. I didn't even know what that meant at the time. Just ran for the pure fun of it, placing third and beating the two mile State AA champ. (My school was AAA at the time.) I think my coach was shocked because I was the first girl to ever run for my high school, even though I was still at the Junior High. That was the best. No expectations - just running for the fun of it.

Thanks for posing the question, made me reminisce and remember why I still run. Still trying to replicate that feeling after all these years.

Good video. Thanks.

chuckxc wrote:

Re: Chapter 1 - Would have to be my first XC season in '74.

Sophomore year in HS. Went to Vanny for the first time with the Varsity. Probably was Manhattan Invitational.

During the prerace jog over the course, I remember asking my older teammates why certain trees had paint marks on them. They told me that's where a runner died in a previous race. I BELIEVED them ! .

hola chuckxc! ...ok, this is a little weird...why?? As I was actually captain of your Bishop McDevitt high school cross country team in 1974 know that the urban legend that Barton and I et al passed down to you, our lone soph making the big trip to nyc that year, was the same lore that we had received as younguns' from Gilman and Heesen when we first made the squad to nyc (then Fordham xc invite)in 1972...even as seasoned big city tough Philly guys we were always a tiny bit overwhelmed by the uber-intense mania of racing at Van Cortland (easily offset by the Whie Castle burger joint just across the street)... Go Lancers!

Wow Mike, I have to agree what a great way to start of the thread.

It has been many moon since I last posted, but I could not pass up on this one.

My last season of running xc at SSU in our league finals it was going to be a tough fight with Humboldt St for the team championship. Our poor little D2 school was never taken seriously, but for some reason that year we were on fire. My teammate Mike was the top runner in our league and when we went through the first mile I was back in 12th place going around a narrow trail at a park called Spring Lake. As I passed my coach, Danny Aldridge, he yells out to me, "the ducks are on the pond, the ducks are on the pond." What the hell does that mean, so I figured he wanted me to go hunting lumberjacks. There were 5 of them between Mike and I and a few Davis and Chico guys. In the end I finished 2nd behind Mike and another teammate Phil finished 3rd. However, we lost the meet due to our 4th and 5th guys finishing back in 20th and 21st. But I will never forget the feeling of passing and beating all those guys and going 1-2-3 in our last home meet together.

Great stories..I love "ducks are on he pond " !

Hey, Pete. Checked it out:

http://www.runningtimes.com/Article.aspx?ArticleID=17578

Excellent - you may see me quoting this link

One good drill for runners to help wih tight hamstrings, is to alternate (on the same leg) your knee lift with the butt kick - only with more of a running action on the butt kick - wish I had a video link to show!!

Keep up the good work

On the Cross Country read the novel 'The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner' and one day I will post how Walter Hesketh beat Gordon Pirie to win the English cross country a very long time ago

Had a weird workout tonight, I did 60 minutes of advanced spin then ran pretty hard for me for another 25 minutes and still did not feel that tired. The only thing I can think of is that I had a unintended taper. The last workout I had was in Asheville 6 days ago while away on business. I think I am getting in better shape and will pick up the pace a bit. Dropping another 10 would help. Its a good to have endurance again. I guess for me endurance comes before speed.