It's been awhile

It's been a while since I posted our last blog. Much has happened since then so let me at least summarize for you.

We raced on Oct 9th at Jacksonville State University - a DI school about 3 hours from UWA. The races went well - our men won their race and brought home some nice hardware. Our women ran well and finished 3rd overall in the meet.

We had 3 runners finish in the top 10 and 5 runners finish in the top 15 of their race and earn a very attractive t-shirt as a prize. The team trophy was a very nice glass plaque shaped like a mountain - a very welcome relief from the traditional "cheesy" trophy or wooden plaque. Our times were not as fast as we had originally hoped. The race went off close to 11 AM and it had warmed considerably by then - the radio announced it was a record high for that date of the year. Also, we had trained very hard the previous 2 weeks with only an easy run the day before the race, so our guys' legs were tired and heavy to start with. We left knowing that when we do taper, we are going to be running strong.

Our women had 2 runners in the top 5. Our # 3 and # 4 runners were not able to race due to injuries and it looks like they might not race again this year. By the time they are cleared to resume training it may be too close to the conference and/or regional meet to get them ready. We'll have to wait and see. In the meantime, our # 5 and # 6 girls have picked up the pace a good bit lately and, hopefully, they will continue to improve right up until the conference race.

We took the Sunday after the race off and started another 2 week training cycle on Monday, the 11th. The guys ran 2 mile repeats on that Monday and the girls ran 2 mile tempo repeats at tempo pace. Yesterday we did our first real speed session of the year - 400m repeats on our newly measured/mowed grass track. They all loved being able to run on flat, well cared for grass. They were able to really stretch it out and our times were the fastest we've had at UWA since I have been here. The guys did 16x400 with one minute rest and the ladies did 12x400 with one minute rest.

Today was an aerobic mileage run and tomorrow will be an easy recovery run for everybody.

Saturday is Homecoming at UWA and we are going to "participate" in the annual 5K - we are going to run/jog it as a warm-up before we head to a nearby hilly, dirt road to do a hard 10 mile run (men) and 8 mile run (women)- sort of a very long tempo run.

Our next race is a little over a week away now. We will run at the Oakville Mounds course where the Alabama state meet is held each year. It is a beautiful course and reasonably fast. The weather looks like it might be fairly cool - it is 4 hours north of us and at a higher elevation so conditions might be ripe for a fast run.

Only 3 weeks until conference now. After the Oakville Mounds race we will go into our "conference training mode" which includes a light, semi-taper, but not much of one. Our main race is the NCAA South Regional - a 10K which will be run at Sharon Johnston park in Huntsville, AL.

It is going to be a lot of fun to see how our runners do - they have had a great year of training and are close to ready.