Personally, I’ve rented out my house and today hit my road on the way to Eugene for NCAAs and the Olympic Trials. And then a month later I’ll be off to Rio.
I’m sure I’ll see a lot of greatness in Eugene. But the pros aren’t the only ones who should be pursuing greatness. High schoolers, collegians, local studs, masters aces, and even those like myself who don’t run that much should be pursuing greatness this summer (in my case off the track)
Instead of having a formal summer training program this summer, I decided to start the #SummerofGreatness. I’m not sure exactly what it will entail but the idea is to remind you to pursue greatness and have some of your dreams become reality.
Plus, I’ll be trying to pursue a little greatness each day.
So email me your training questions ([email protected]) let us know what you want to see on LetsRun.com this summer and start by posting on here how you’re going to pursue greatness this summer.
Often, I think I’ll answer your questions about running and I pledge to do that at least once a week.
But I’m going to start the Summer of Greatness off with advice for the high schoolers out there. The advice is very simple - run consistently this summer.
Cross country is a summer sport that is played out in the fall. Even if you are a freak talent if you don’t run consistently over the summer, you won’t be as good of a runner you could be this fall. It is not possible to get aerobic fitness just training once the season starts.
Now hopefully most of you reading this take it for granted you need to be running at least six days a week in the summer. But I bet way more high schoolers don’t even realize it. I bet that’s the case because I was one of them.
I considered myself a pretty good high school runner. JV on a very good team my freshman year. Honorable all conference my sophomore year (in a small private school conference) and then all conference as a junior. Problem was I paid lip service to running over the summer. Cross country-season would come around and I would take it very serious, then I’d play basketball in the winter and tennis in the spring. My coach was the famous John Kellogg, yet somehow I didn’t really comprehend I needed to run a lot more than I did in the summer and run year round even if I was playing basketball and tennis.
I seriously thought I took running seriously, but I didn’t because I didn’t run enough in the summer. It isn’t possible to take running seriously if you don’t do it consistently.
Fortunately, the summer before my senior year, a friend of mine who played basketball introduced me to a personal trainer who had me run a mile all out and then input that time into a computer program and it spit out some totally bogus, but very precise training training program that prescribed exactly how far and how fast I should run every day of the summer, five days a week.
I don’t think the training program was any good, and it only had me running 5 days a week instead of six or seven, but the one thing it did was motivate me to run much more in the summer than I had in the past. That laid the groundwork for me becoming a real runner.
My senior year I got second in the conference in cross country and then realized I needed to run in the winter. That enabled me to get good enough to run in college and nine years later after that high school summer I would get fourth in the country in the 10k at USAs in 2001.
I’m proof positive your dreams can become reality.
But I guarantee they won’t get there if you don’t put in the hard work and with cross country that means running in the summer. Many of you already understand this basic advice. Good for you, then help someone else pursue greatness by showing them this article or reminding them running is an aerobic activity. You can’t be very good at it, if you don’t do it consistently. The beauty is it doesn’t take that much time. Everyone’s got an hour they can spend running each day.
Here’s to greatness this summer.
