The #SummerofGreatness is here. It’s June 1. The Olympic Trials start one month from today.
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.
The Summer of Greatness is Here - Episode 1 Get Off Your Ass This Summer
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Great idea. Applies for 40+ guys too. Even a decade ago, you needed like 33:00 to win the Master's division. You can win most 10k's now in 38:00 or even high 39s.
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Interesting that you had an amazing coach, but it was a private strength coach with a crap program that got you running in the summer.
We have a similar situation in our program. We have an amazing event coach that has produced numerous state champions and national #1's. He is by far the best coach I've ever seen and his results from the bottom up prove it. But some of the kids for some reason don't fully trust the program. I don't know what it is but so few can just do what they are asked.
Looking back, what was the disconnect for you WeJo? Was it confidence? Fear? Lack of maturity? Something else?
I'm intrigued. A coach says, "run in the summer" and gives a plan. Gives up his summer, isn't paid and so few commit or do their own thing. -
Runners Gunna Run wrote:
I don't know what it is but so few can just do what they are asked.
I'm intrigued. A coach says, "run in the summer" and gives a plan. Gives up his summer, isn't paid and so few commit or do their own thing.
What it is is a kid being a normal kid, a good coach has to try and work around it, get them though a certain age to their late teens and things may change, then again they may not, some people never learn, what ever their age. -
This sounds like a great idea. Consistency is SO important for high schoolers. Once you have that, a good coach will direct that to something awesome.
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Runners Gunna Run wrote:
Interesting that you had an amazing coach, but it was a private strength coach with a crap program that got you running in the summer.
We have a similar situation in our program. We have an amazing event coach that has produced numerous state champions and national #1's. He is by far the best coach I've ever seen and his results from the bottom up prove it. But some of the kids for some reason don't fully trust the program. I don't know what it is but so few can just do what they are asked.
Looking back, what was the disconnect for you WeJo? Was it confidence? Fear? Lack of maturity? Something else?
I'm intrigued. A coach says, "run in the summer" and gives a plan. Gives up his summer, isn't paid and so few commit or do their own thing.
I feel like I just didn't know or understand how important it was to run over the summer. Somehow that message didn't get across and maybe since I didn't run track in the spring it wasn't conveyed to me like some others.
It baffles me that I didn't run more. Also I suffered from injuries so maybe I thought I couldn't run more. Or maybe I just thought running a few days a week was sufficient. I have no idea what I did in terms of training over the summer. -
I had it easy, motivation-wise.
Track would wind up, and the July 4 road race was just about a month away. Train. Then after that, the summer vacation would loom, and always involved new, fun places to run. Train. Train hard there. Get back, and XC practices were only a few weeks off, train! -
Untrue. The famous John Kellogg invented Corn Flakes in 1878. Your coach was lying if he made that claim.
wejo wrote: 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. -
Phil Fondacaro wrote:
Untrue. The famous John Kellogg invented Corn Flakes in 1878. Your coach was lying if he made that claim.
wejo wrote: 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.
John Kellogg was also the coach of tony the tiger on this forum.
He was a gggggrrrrrrreeeeeaaaaaatttttttt!!! coach. -
The summer is for taking it easy.
Even in running.
In college, I was running fall, winter and spring straight through.
July was usually a month with no running and August would be a gradual build of easy running - 2 days a week then 3 days then 4 days then 5 at the end of August before XC training started. -
I have another thread detailing my personal summer challenge: to complete a 2-day, 60+ mile alpine ultra link-up, as well as to attempt to get as close to my age as possible in the 400 (age 59). I hope that this will help give a diverse basis for successful 800/1500 competition at age 60 next year. Hopefully this combines fun and challenge in the right proportion.
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There's lots of summer track and plenty of kids and grownups participate.
Anyone training for a fall marathon is working hard in the summer heat.
Plenty of local 5ks, trail races, etc.
There's opportunity to race and train all summer if you have the slightest motivation. -
This maybe warrants it's own thread, I found out today my high school cross country coach Mr Mank (Evans) died over the weekend.
He was a very kind man and I was fortunate enough to become his friend in later years.
I'll be most grateful to him for encouraging me as a kid. I'll never forgot getting out of the van after a meet when I was I think a sophomore and thinking I had run pretty well and hoping he'd notice and say something. He did. That has always stuck with me. Not sure why I wanted his approval so much but high school kids are very impressionable.
Mr. Mank was also confident enough to work with John Kellogg and let John design all our workouts. A lot of coaches wouldn't have been wise enough to do this or had to big of egos, but not Mr. Mank. He let John do his thing and without either one of them, there wouldn't be a letsrun.
I was telling my mom about Mr Mank's death and I was talking indirectly about this thread and why I didn't run more over the summer. She said, "I wouldn't have wanted you running 5 days a week anyway!"
She pointed out I hit my stride at the right time. Maybe my body wasn't ready for it and I'll for people taking it easy in the summer and not burning out but I think most high school runners would be a lot better with a better summer base. -
I was fortunate enough to join the Santa Monica Atlhletic Association, the forerunner of the Santa Monica Track Club, the summer after my junior high school year. Ole Oleson, a year ahead, encouraged me to come out and run for Coach Mihaly Igloi. That was the summer of 1967.
Ole (USC) went on to win the 1969 NCAA two mile indoor and three mile outdoor, besting Frank Shorter (Yale) and Dick Beurkle (Villanova). I never had that kind of success. Coach Igloi's influence on American distance running is well known.
The decision to join the club had a prefound influence on my life. It was amazing that Coach Igloi would let a 4:50 miler even join the club. I even called him Coach Igloo that first day. He probably got a chuckle out of that. I believe the fee to join was $50.
Today some forty-nine years later, I continued my own quest at 6:00 am with a track workout that featured 5 x 600m at 2:39-2:30. Not outstanding but done before work. Perhaps just staying in the game constitutes a Summer of Greatness.
Igy -
First off, thank you for posting this. You have a lot of good insight. I told my high school daughter about this thread and she told me that she read it.
We're going through some tough times right now and I'm glad my daughter is still motivated to run and train this summer. We will also be @ the Olympic Trials next month and it would be great if LetsRun had a meet up during that time. P.s. We might wear our LetsRun shirts...😘 -
Thanks for the read, Wejo. I remember being in 9th grade. 15 years old, new to the sport. It was my first year of committing to run a sport. I was the Toronto 400m champion. I ran my heart out at provincials. Then I needed a break. Mentally, and physically. I stopped running, and returned, that September. I was somehow SO slow. I thought I was still serious, playing soccer every week. That was my downfall.
Ended up losing all of my progress to a mental health battle. I had no more motivation to run, even though it was the only good thing I had in my life. I had no talent. No money. All I had was running. I haven't managed to run consistently since then.
The things I would do, to go back a few years. When I was a senior, I decided to stop running so I could focus on school. I still did terribly in school. I had so much potential. On and off the track.
I have been running consistently for about two weeks now. At about 30mpw maybe. Just running by feel, leaving my watch at home so I can keep things easy. Not timing anything. I was looking at all the awards, medals, plaques, and ribbons that I won.. And I managed to put my old spikes back on -untouched these past few years.
After all of this, I needed to vent a bit. -
I had a similar case of not reaching my potential in high school. For me though, I had an ok, but not great coach and we had no team commraderie. Just about no one on the team besides myself would train outside of practice. My coach didn't really give us any advice on summer running other than, just do some running, and "I'll know who's been running over the summer by what you can do in August". Needless to say, I had no one to train with. All the top athletes at the school did football or soccer anyways. I got training advice from runners world which suggested 40 miles a week was the start of "high mileage" and that only marathoners really ran more than that. That's what I did summer before sophmore year of high school, 40 miles a week, over the same course every day. Five 6 mile runs and a 10 mile long run, rarely picking up the pace. Unsurprisingly I was getting bored with running, and almost quit. By senior year I'd varied my courses some but not much as I didn't have a car, but because I considered myself injury prone I was only doing 60-65 miles a week. I didn't even realize doubles were a thing until about that time and thought they were only for top runners. God I held myself back so much.
Summer is for exploring, figure out where those trails go, where that random path in the woods goes, what's in that neighborhood. Vary your runs, run different paces, do summer of malmo. In hs I remember everyone told me I was crazy to run so much; today I'd tell a hs upperclassman he'd be crazy to run so little. People told me I wouldn't improve that much, that running in college would be a waste of time and I should focus on academics. What baloney. Go crazy, dare to be great. I'd take the midpacker who sets a goal of winning state over the steady performer who was all state last year, but has no long term goals of running in college or after college every time. Dare to be great.
This summer I'm making it my goal to get back up to 140 miles a week. I'm going to make running the number 1 priority when I'm outside work. -
This is an appreciation post for Weldon and Robert for creating a "high school" forum. Three years ago I was a naive yet physically talented eight grader who caught the eye of my jr high track coach during pe class. He thought it to be a good idea for me to run for their team in the spring so I tried it and the very first meet I pulled off a decent mile 5:30? but hated it. I hated the pain that came with it (ran a 68 first lap). I'd much rather have been training for the summer baseball season in all honesty. He came up to me after the race all excited and thrilled but I was ready to never step foot on a track again. He told me the winner of that race didn't break 5 minutes and that by the end of the season I could win our conference championships.
Nevertheless I had no idea how I could possibly run faster (I literally died that third lap) but I was somewhat curious and googled 'tips to run a faster mile' and that somehow led me to letsrun. By the end of the year I didn't break 5 (placed third 5:07) or win the conference champs (4:57) but I really liked running and thought maybe I'd consider the high school team next spring. Later I was on my computer again and noticed the letsrun tab was still open and looking around in it I saw a forum labeled high school training and I thought it crazy to have a whole section devoted to it but I saw the threads about summer training and silly kids' posting their times and cross country placings and that got me thinking hey why not me too!
Eventually I came across some SOM and other Malmo threads and did my own version of it and had major success trying cross country (loved the competition and dedicatioin required). So as it goes I skipped basketball season and ran track and before I know it I was a serious runner without even really knowing it.
Back to now, I would like to voice my appreciations for the interest in high school students and seeing they become better. I definitely wouldn't have become what I am now (15min 5k runner went to FL this winter)
Basically keep up the good work and reaching out to adolescences.
I've never posted on here before and probably won't again but I still visit these forums often.
