2 days until the Twilight Meet

We are about 60 hours away from our races at the Memphis Twilight Meet on Saturday.

We have had a good training week since our race at the U of Alabama on Sat, 9-18. We had a great long run on Sunday, the 19th. The freshmen guys really pushed themselves on that run and got a lot out of it.

Our only real "workout" was yesterday. The guys did 6 x 1000m with 2' recovery at their current 5K pace and the ladies did a 4.8 mi tempo run. Most of the guys were able to hit their assigned paces pretty well - a couple fell off the pace midway through the workout. The ladies' tempo run went well.

We have had several of our women's team missing from practice this week due to various nagging injuries. We are fortunate to have an excellent swimming pool in which we can do deep water running as well as various swimming type conditioning activities. Also, our # 1 guy runner, Austin, has been doing just deep water running and swimming this week - he is trying to rest his sprained ankle and it looks like he may be able to run on Saturday.

The race looks to be a huge one - a very, very large field with lots of DI schools and several schools from our conference. I have been telling our young runners that it is always a good thing to beat other teams/runners from our conference whenever we happen to be in the same meet. You like to set a precedent and put some doubt in their minds about their ability to beat us.

The race is held at the Mike Rose Soccer Complex in Memhis. It is almost perfectly flat and the race is held at night. It's a fast course and the competition is stiff. If the weather is cool times should be great.

We have started putting together our race plans and final copies are due today. In fact, we "practiced" our race mentally today - even though it was a relatively easy distance run, we "mentally practiced - talked to ourselves - our race plans during the run. We started out slower than usual - under control - and then picked up the pace at places in the workout where we would pick up the paces in our upcoming race. This helps get the plan locked into the bodies as well as the minds of our runners.

We'll practie it again this way tomorrow morning. We like to let the team sleep later on the morning before the race - we know they won't sleep as well the night before the race because of excitement. So we'll get up later and "practice" the race during our easy run.

Confidence seems high and if we can get a weather break, I think we'll run fast. Regardless of the weather, I think we are ready to run well.

I'll post our results on Sunday when we get back home from the race.

coach M