One Week To Go!!!!!!

Our conference meet is one week away - Saturday Nov 6th at Veterans' Park, next to Spain Park High School, in Hoover, AL.

We concluded a hard week of training this morning. We will start cutting back a little bit on mileage this week in preparation for the conference championsip race.

On Tuesday, we ran 7 x 800m on our grass track with 60" recoveries. That put a little bit of speed in our legs for the main workout of the week - what we call the Oregon for short. It is a 10K race simulator - the runners do 1200m (3x400) at 3 paces - faster than race pace, close to race pace and close to tempo pace. They then go out on our grass loop for a 2.75 mi tempo run which ends on the track and starts another 1200 at close to race pace leading out to another 2.75 mi at tempo pace and closing with another 1200(3 x 400) at close to tempo pace down to close to race pace down to faster than race pace.

Both of these workouts went well, especially the Oregon. It is such a good indicator of fitness and race readiness. Doing well on it really built up our team's confidence. They know they are fit and race ready because they did so well on this workout.

Today's training session was a hard run up a very hilly dirt road - total distance of 8.48 miles measured with a Garmin satellite watch. It was one of our very best training sessions of the entire season - we had 5 runners average under 6:00 per mile for this difficult road along with 4 others who were within 10" per mile of averaging 6:00/mi. All told, we have had 7 runners go under 6:00 per mile for this workout - 3 of the 5 times we did it we ran 10 miles as opposed to 8.48. This is really a test of one's ability to concentrate and focus. The road is essntially uphill most of the way and it's a very demaning session. So we have seen that our speed is up to par, our race fitness is up to par and we can grind out a sustained effort over a long (8.48 mi) period of time.

All that's left for us now is a recovery run tomorrow - 8-10 miles for our guys and 8 miles for our girls.

Monday we will do some intervals - repeat miles for the guys and repeat 800's for the girls.

Wednesday will be a short, peppy workout 3 x 800-600-400 with good rest after each/

Thursday and Friday will be short easy days with some strides and we hope we will be ready to rumble on Saturday morning.

We've put in some excellent work so far his year. I hope the guys do well enough so they will feel it was all worth it. I do know this - this is the best team we have had - by far - since I have been at UWA and, according to records, since we joined the GSC almost 20 years ago.

Fingers crossed.