Cross Country 2024 - Summer Training

My last blog entry ended with my recognizing that perhaps Coach S may be on to something when he suggests I'm verbose.  While that may seem harsh, I do have a tendency to babble, and I'll do my best to avoid that here now, and moving forward through my favorite season, the XC season.  It's been said that Cross Country is a summer sport which is played out in the Fall, and I tend to agree.  Student-athletes who prepare during the summer months have the ability to slowly work toward their goal of being ready for competition.  This year, formal practices begin August 19th, and we host Marshfield on September 10th.  Three weeks may be sufficient time to get past the discomfort accompanying the start of a running program, but it's nowhere close to getting you ready to run a 5K effectively.  Summer training is essential.  It's one of the reasons we hold strength and conditioning sessions on Tuesday and Thursday evenings at 4:00PM all summer long.  If you're serious about being good at our sport and understand that injury prevention begins and ends with adequate preparation, then you'll want to attend.  It's also important to note that we are making wholesale changes to our training program this year.  While the training methods we've employed in previous years have focused on injury prevention and running enjoyment, they have recently left us falling short on our goal of having successful, winning seasons.  We feel the new direction in which we're heading, which has been proven locally to achieve those three elements, is the best course for the future.  In the upcoming season our daily training will begin with a (new) warmup routine, appropriate for any sport, which takes 17-20 minutes, and which will be introduced during the summer strength and conditioning sessions.  The second segment of our daily training regimen will, of course, be running.  Running is something you must be disciplined enough to do, on your own, over the next two months.  We can provide you with an appropriate run training plan upon request. The third and final portion of our formal fall practices will be what we call post run work.  Again, this is not sport specific, and can be beneficial to any athlete, any sport.  And this too, we'll be introducing over the summer.  

Enough said.  No babbling.  Tuesdays and Thursdays, 4:00 PM at the WHRHS Track.  The fall season begins tomorrow.