Hatchery Thursday, bikes, and physicals

Ladies,

Today promised to be a hot one, so thank your lucky stars we practice in the morning! Amazing... it was cool enough to force me to put on a sweatshirt before practice started, but by the end I was thankful to have on a tech shirt.

*Announcement!
Bret's mother has contacted... oh, what the heck, let's hear it straight from her:

"I called Promptcare East. They do sports physicals. They told me that a nurse will most likely do the physical, but then an MD would sign off on it as well. They don't take appointments, just walk-ins. Open 8-8."

There you go. If you aren't aware, Promptcare is in Bloomington, and is probably the fastest way to take care of your physicals. Of course if you have a family doctor and can get in, go there if that's your choice, but however it gets done, we need to start working on getting the physicals in. You must have 10 official practices before you can run a meet, and you can't get an official practice unless you have turned in your physical. This is an IHSAA rule, and will be followed to the letter!

Bikes!
Today marked the first day of using the bike option, and while our venue wasn't the perfect place to do it, two young ladies made the most of it. Only one thrown chain! Do not be afraid to ask for the option if you are hurting. Better to do it now than later, when it will take longer to recover from injury.

Tech shirts!
There was a little discussion today regarding athletic wear. My best recommendation is to replace your cotton Ts with tech shirts if you have them. Cotton can be brutal on the skin once it gets wet - chafing can leave you bloody! I would gladly lend you some of mine, but somehow I can't imagine some of you petite ladies swallowed up in my adult large sizes. Correction: I guess I just did imagine it! Whatever choice you make, your coach strongly states you must have a top over your jog bras.

Electrolytes!
Take them in. Gatorade, Enduralytes, salt tablets, pick your poison, but take electrolytes. This cannot be stressed enough!

Catfish Festival 5k!
The 5k is this Saturday for those interested. Entry fee is $20, race starts at 8 AM from the ball diamond area (easily visible from Highway 50). This is not a required run at all, feel free to go or not go at your discretion, but it is a nice local race where I believe the bulk of our team would be pretty competitive.

Practice Tomorrow!
Parkview track, 8 AM. Guest runner: Dr. Jimmy Sowders!

Fartlek

Ladies,

Had a nice little fartlek workout today, most girls going 5 miles, a couple going less (nagging injuries). You folks managed to work in about 2 or more miles of hard work, so that's a good speed session.

I hooked up Summer today, and you can find her data here. Note the fastest pace run - 5:36! You folks are faster than you think you are.

That's food for thought. You cannot teach fast - you have it or you don't. What you can teach is endurance, and if you start with someone with natural speed and can condition that person to be able to use that speed for longer and longer periods of time... you get the idea. That's what you try to accomplish with 5k racing training.

When I watch you run, especially when you are on step (what I call faster running, because of how the running gate changes to a more forward stance, the same way a speedboat gets up higher on the hull), I see there is plenty of talent to be a successful team. Time is what we need, time to get healthy, time to build conditioning, time to be prepared to train hard at summer's end.

Next week is moratorium. Run. Don't make excuses, run. It takes continuity to be a great endurance athlete. Find a team mate, and run.

It's going to be hot the next few days. Drink more electrolytes. This is no joke. Even in the mornings it's going to be insanely hot. If you take care of electrolytes, you won't suffer nearly as much. If you don't, you'll grind down to a nub faster than you can imagine possible.

The Hatchery tomorrow! Water every lap!

A different day, a different run

Ladies,

Back to the track today! We went easy, going 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6-mile distances. Danielle, Carrie, and Lauren went for the longest distance, and since Carrie hadn't been Garmined yet, she won the sweepstakes and was our data collector for today.

Carrie's run data here.

A word about Garmins in general... they are imperfect devices. The nature of a mobile GPS device, especially wrist-mounted varieties, dictates certain compromises. The accuracy of any GPS starts with the polling rate, or how often it looks to satellites to triangulate your current position. The more often the device polls, the more accurate the data. The trade-off is every poll eats battery. So... to extend battery life, the device polls less often. No biggie, right?

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. If your run is straight line, it doesn't matter a bit. When the GPS picks up your data, it's along a predictable path, so no real error is introduced. However, if you run a course with many turns, the polling rate can make a significant difference in reported distance. The Garmin can't draw curved lines... it only draws straight. That means if you turn a corner, and you hit the polling timing right (or wrong!), you could lose the entire corner on distance. The only thing worse than that would be to run on a circle.

Hillcrest Circle.

If you look at Carrie's data, you can see what the Garmin did to her path there. It's the best illustration of how accurate/inaccurate the technology is. The final piece to the accuracy of distance is the accuracy of the GPS itself. The satellite triangulation can pinpoint you to around 3 meters, fine if someone is trying to drop a smart bomb on your head, but it can lead to slight inaccuracies for an endurance athlete.

Here's the thing, and this was a long way to get there... always assume you went farther than your GPS tells you, unless you are doing a straight course. Every turn introduces error, to the tune of under-reporting the total distance. 

Tomorrow we meet at the track again, Thursday will be the Hatchery. We are trying to build our running time ladies, so expect practices to start to take slightly longer. 

The trails

Ladies,

First, and apology. I thought everyone got the text for today's run, but clearly that's not what happened. I'll have to make certain next time everyone gets the message.

Second, I really intended for today's run to be easy. It wasn't. Just the run to get to the trails and back was about 3 miles of rolling terrain, anything but easy at our current conditioning level. Then I sent 4 of you into the deep trails, and that got worse. Sorry about that!

That said, I really loved the condition of the trails. They are in great shape, and I intend to make full use of them this year. We could easily do mile repeats back there and have a great surface for it.

Tomorrow we'll do Parkview. Thursday I'd like to to the Hatchery. Just getting that out there right now!

Here is my run data today, as collected by Lady Garmin.

The Graaaaveyaaaard....

Okay, so maybe that didn't go as well as expected.

I've run in Greenhill Cemetery before, but it's been a while. I remember it being a pretty big loop, and I suppose it could be, if you stuck to the perimeter. Alas, the way the roads are laid out, that is easier said than done. As a result, the course is a 0.6 mile soon-to-be-tiresome way to get 5 miles. Not a good plan for anyone possessing any form of consciousness, so it's quite doubtful we'll do that one again soon.

Too bad. I like the rolling terrain for our purposes. Not to worry though... I'm planning on BNL one day next week. We'll run from campus to the railroad bed. That will be a good run!

Next week is the last week of June, and it's the last week I can have contact with any of you for one week (IHSAA required summer moratorium on training). Our big goal next week is to continue to build miles, but also to continue working on faster-paced running.

Notice I didn't say all-out running.

It's too early in the training cycle for all-out running. You can push, and you can push each other (already happening!), just don't go flat out. I have another drill up my sleeve, my ladies... just wait and see...

Oh, and here's Brett's data for today. 

The Hatchery

Ladies,

Sure, it was a muggy morning out, but somehow things never seem so bad at the Hatchery. You all did a wonderful job, most of you getting 5 miles. It was good to see you running together, which is something that doesn't always work out.

Tomorrow we'll start from Parkview, but I think we'll head over to Greenhill Cemetery. It might be pavement, but it has features that make it very reminiscent of a lot of cross-country courses - apart from the graves, of course. The terrain rolls a bit more than we've been doing, and since it is a loop, the faster runners will see the slower runners over and over.

What is the exact distance of the inner perimeter? I don't know. Tomorrow, we'll find out!

Wednesday, easy

Ladies,

Today, outside of a couple of injured girls, we tried for 5 easy miles. Yesterday's workout was a hard one, so we needed a recovery day to help heal.

A word about recovery days: use them. Trying to bypass recovery is a wonderful recipe for getting hurt. It takes a while to convert the body to long-distance endurance athletics, and there are no shortcuts. Stress/recovery is the pattern, not stress/more stress.

Tomorrow we are running at the Hatchery. I am pulling things together for a real trail run soon. Details will soon follow.

Here is a map of a proposed run starting at BNL. Click Here