Sunday, August 24, 2014

First meet

Ladies,

Here it is. First meet! We've worked a long time to get to this point - in fact, all summer. Now it's time to test our mettle, to toe the line and find out what is what. Tomorrow we see past and future rivals, get to see them in field conditions, and determine our course of action from this point forward. It's a big day.

Fear not. Competition is nothing to be afraid of. Will you be nervous? Of course. Excited? Certainly! But that's a good thing. You'll know you're alive when you get to the start with that heightened sense of awareness, just before the "fight or flight" instinct kicks in. If you don't feel it now, you probably will then.

Let me then talk a bit about our race plan for tomorrow. Easy - we are using this as a tempo run. We want to run 85% effort, not all out - at least, not until the last 200m. Then you can let it go. I'm not concerned about winning the meet. The truth is, the only thing I'm worried about is placing as highly as possible in Conference, Sectional, Regional, and Semi-State. That will never change. These other races show us what we need to work on to get us ready for those other meets.

Tomorrow will be heinously hot. I have no intention of losing anyone for the season to heat stroke. We can run a hard effort, but I don't see any purpose to an all-out effort. Besides, I think the teams that do use that approach will explode, and if so will hand their places to us anyway.

That's the way it is with racing... sometimes you race the clock, sometimes you race the conditions. Tomorrow we race the conditions.

I have no time goals in mind. That doesn't mean you don't have to work, it simply means until this race is done I won't have any clear idea where you are at. This meet will be one of our hard workouts for the week and also a shakedown cruise. I'll be looking for bugs or anything else that will need to be tweaked.

I expect everyone to be at the course by 4:30 PM dressed and ready to go. See you there!

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