2 days and counting

The Crimson Classic, held at the U of Alabama is only 2 days away now. Just looked at the entry list and it is...awesome. 173 runners in the women's 5K and 193 runners in the men's 8K. Some very strong teams, including Alabama, Auburn, Kennesaw State, Ole Miss, Samford, Texas A&M, Tulane and DII regional powerhouse, Columbus State University.

This is a great opportunity for our runners to knock heads with some very talented opponents. Hopefully, the competition will motivate us to run at our very best. The course for the Crimson Classic is a good bit tougher than we saw at the season opener at Jax State. There are some hills on this course that need to be respected.

One of our goals for this race is to really focus on our second mile. In the opener at JSU, our pace in the 2nd mile dropped off dramatically - too dramatically to be perfectly honest. We have done some training to help remedy that situation and we'll see how effective it is. We have done some long intervals with short recoveries to help us be able to hold our opening paces for a longer period of time.

In addition, we have talked a good deal about pace - our runners, as often happens in season opening races, went out much faster than they were ready to handle and got in over their heads in mile # 2. We are going to try to go in a much more controlled fashion this race and see if we can't run it more evenly paced with a very strong last 1200m to 1600m.

Kealth wise we are a little banged up. Our men's # 1, Austin Enriquez, has been having some plantar fascitis problems and is questionable for this race. Our # 3, # 4 and # 5 girls are all out for this this race - one with a severe case of shin splints, one with a calf problem and one with a case of the flu.

Still, in all, it is a great opportunity for us to see where we are at, conditioning wise, at this early point in the season.

The weather promises to be dry and, perhaps, even a bit cool in the morning with a cold front expected to pass on through the area over the weekend.

Our hard workouts this week included some 300m hill repeats this morning and an intervas session on Tuesday - the runners used the distance they covered in an all out 5:00 run at the start of the season and ran 4-5 repeats of that same distance in 5:30 with only 75" rest. A tough workout but they handled it well, as they did with the hills today, so we have some confidence that we can run well.

The runners will hand in their race plans tonight and I'll go over them and make suggestions where appropriate. I'll get them back the runners tomorrow morning and they'll have the day to start "absorbing" the race plan.

I love these large meets! It seems the amount of adrenaline the runners produce is directly proportional to the # of runners in the race. With 173 and 193 in the women's and men's races, respetively, there should be ample adrenaline flowing on Saturday.

Will post the results on Saturday. Hold a good thought for us.

M