Coaches Corner April - 2018

While winter is slow to relinquish her grasp on the weather, spring is here for me as I’m now two weeks deep into spring track.  The middle school kids joined us this week with all their exuberance and lack of focus, making my already grey hair retain its translucency.   While it’s great to see their unbridled energy, corralling them into becoming athletes appears to be this season’s challenge.

The beautiful thing is for me is that I’ve got a lot of new kids coming out for track this season and so far, they’ve shown excitement and determination that can be hard to find when the temperature is 42 degrees and it’s raining.  There are no other sports at Mascenic that continue to train outdoors when the weather’s bad, just us.

This isn’t meant to be a brag about track athletes or even my athletes, it’s just an observation that we’ve got some new kids that have played other sports coming to us, a sport outside their comfort zone willing to put in some hard work in difficult conditions.  Resiliency seems a fleeting trait among young people, looking for easier ways around more difficult problems.

One of the other observations I’ve made this season relates to the other spring sports at our school.  The number of athletes in the track program grew over last year while we saw significant drops in baseball and softball.  Neither of these teams will host a JV program due to lack of interest, and one can ill afford any injuries or they may have to forfeit some games.  I can’t pinpoint the exact reason however I feel that some of it is the dependence those athletes have on the other members of their team in order to fulfill their potential.

With us it’s simple.  What you put in is what you get out.  Athletes get the opportunity to choose their level of commitment and amend it as they develop the skills necessary to compete.  Someone brand new to the sport shouldn’t have the same commitment that one of my four year State Championship cross country runners does.  The champ should be all in, knowing both how much I will give and what they are looking to get out of the season. The newbie is just getting their feet wet in the sport, not yet knowing what the sport can give them.

That’s not necessarily true with baseball or softball.  The team lives and dies by its weakest player, whether weakest is defined by skills level or interest.  And if it becomes about living up to the teams goals and not about building on an individual’s potential, there are some that might see through the smoke and decide to invest more in themselves.

My windfall has not come at the expense of the baseball or softball teams directly.  I have only one athlete that has converted over from softball as they said they never really liked it but went along with their friends.  However I definitely pulled from the pool of potential candidates for those other teams giving me the biggest numbers I’ve ever had. It’s would be nice to chalk it up to my magnetic personality but I think there are different reasons afoot.

The beauty of this sport is that you get out of it what you put into it.  Hard work and persistence always wins out in stronger performances, both on the track or trail, in the classroom, and in life in general.  No one has ever ended up worse off from working hard and our sport is full of hard work.

I’m looking forward to working with this new group of track athletes over this season, seeing what they’re capable of and what kind of athletes they turn into.  For those that continue on with cross country in the fall, I’m hoping to develop the habits that will make them successful on the course. For those playing other sports I’m hoping the hard work they do this spring prepares them for success on the field hockey field or volleyball court.  They certainly will have learned that the value is in the work and performance comes from that.

I’ll see you out there.

Wednesday Night Workouts are back!

Starting April 4th at 6pm we’ll begin “track” workouts at ConVal.  All workouts are geared off 5K goals but work well for all distance goals.  Want to improve on your marathon time? 5K speed work will do it for you.

April workouts below:

April     4th        Bread and butter 200’s

    11th        300/200 workout

    18th         Negative split run

    25th        10 lap TT

Coming up!  Valhalla RC is hosting a Citizen’s mile at Mascenic HS preceding its home meet on May 5th.  Wondered what your official mile time is?  Show up for the 9:40 race and rip four laps on Mascenic’s “classic” stone dust track and then hang around and watch the local teams compete!  Sure to be a good time.

June 16th, 8am    Caddyshack Classic 5K, held at the Shattuck golf course, Jaffrey, NH , run the beautiful back nine on the golf course with views of Mount Monadnock on likely the most scenic 5K you’ve ever run.  Sign up on active.com

Coach's Corner March - 2018

2018 March Coaches Corner

They say spring comes in like a lion and out like a lamb meaning the weather is usually pretty fierce in early spring but has settled down by the time the end of the month rolls around.  Not sure who’s in charge of the weather situation, God, Mother Nature, or climate change, but whoever’s at the controls this past winter I have a bone to pick with them.  This has been a rough winter for training, partly because I’ve gone into it a little bunged up and partly because either the weather is bad, or the roads are bad.

I’ve been pretty successful in meeting my goals of not missing too much time (four off days in the last three months) but it certainly hasn’t been easy.  My neighbor and I have been out running laps around the HS parking lot on days we’ve had school cancelled, dodging the plows as they try to clear the parking spots.  I’ve bundled up with two pair of running pants, a long sleeve shirt, a thermal shirt, a sweatshirt, two  pairs of socks, ice screws in the shoes, a hat and two pairs of gloves to brave the sub zero temperatures.  We’ve run in the dark with headlamps.  We’ve run on holidays.  We’ve run on three different types of ice.  We’ve even driven 90 minutes, to run for 90 minutes, to drive back 90 minutes, just so we could get our shoes on some real dirt, not the kind they throw on snow to make it less slippery.

But this old body is looking forward to shorts and short sleeves in a way I’ve never desired it before.  I think part of it is the freedom.  But I also think the tired and worn ligaments, cartilage and muscles are noticing the hardness that frozen roads and landscaping are more now than ever.  It seems my knee joints and ankle hurt after every run, and bother me when I get up in the morning.  I’ve began to wear the knee strap meant to keep the IT band in place and cause less pain.  Not sure what the magic is with two pieces of neoprene, a piece of rubber tubing and some Velcro but won’t knock the results.

When I was young, and I felt the urge to run, I just did it.  Didn’t matter what my training was, where I was with mileage, how much I’d already put into run, I just ran.  I remember on my seventeenth birthday running 17+ miles just to show I could do it but I had probably run less than 17 miles the week before.

Things have certainly changed.  If I run long I need to be careful what I do the next day.  Admittedly the 15 extra pounds I’m running around with aren’t helping any but I could get away with so much more as a youth.  Now I have to prepare, pay attention to what I’m doing and what I’m trying to do.  And while it would be nice to go back to the days where I would just go out and hammer and then turn around the next day and do it all over again, I appreciate that I have to pay attention and be a steward of my fitness.  I have to make sure I’m prepare to “train” if I want to see results.

Training has a purpose.  To make oneself better than they were before.  But before is a relative term.  I can be better than I was yesterday, but I have no illusions that I can be better than I was 10 years ago.  Moving forward is about getting better, but getting better doesn’t mean getting faster all the time.  It means becoming a better steward of the body.  Getting the most of this vessel that allows us the joy of running.  If I was a crab, or a kangaroo, or a tree sloth, running would mean something much different.  But thankfully for me it means exactly what it affords me, the opportunity to get out there and work on becoming the best I can be, in that moment, and nothing more.  It’s raw, it’s primal, it’s what I was born to do.

I’ll see you out there.

Date change*  

March 18th, noon time, The 6th Eighth Annual Dead Possum half marathon, New Ipswich’s hilliest half!  For more information, msmith@mascenic.org