Track season has come to a close and I have taken my 2 week break/transition between seasons. It’s nice having time off for something not related to an injury. The two weeks went by quickly with finals and some traveling during the first week of summer break. I started my summer training on Saturday with nothing but a 40 minute easy run. It’s strange starting summer training this early (mid May), when I’m usually not even done with Track season yet. Typically it isn’t until mid-June when my Summer training begins. With this said, it’s smart not start back too hard too soon. For one, I don’t want to burn out. Two, getting really fit really early can often result in peaking too soon and not being at my best come the end of the Cross Country season. The benefits of starting this early are that I will not have to rush any training, and will be able to build up to the mileage that will help me improve most. Starting this early means that I will definitely be getting as fit as I can possibly get this summer, which is exciting!
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Track Season:
Considering that I did not write any blog posts during indoor or outdoor track season, I have some catching up to do. Things went well for the most part, I got in some solid uninterrupted training, and finished with some PRs.
February-
Ran a crappy 3k indoors at Albuquerque. We’ll go ahead and leave the time out.
Ran a slight converted PR in the Mile at Colorado School of Mines indoor meet. It converted to a 4:35 mile or 4:34 1600, which would be about a 3 second PR off a very mediocre High School time.
March- Got in some very good training, even hitting one 80 mile week. My workouts continued to progress each week as well. My speed improved considerably as well, the track workouts continued to get better and my tempo runs got much quicker even while they were increasing in distance. My confidence definitely grew through the good training.
April/Early May-
Opened up the Outdoor Season with an alright 3k at Albuquerque, that converted to about a 9:47ish 3200 mile at sea level. So alright, but not even my High School PR.
Went home and raced at Western Illinois University in the 3k and ran a PR of 9:04 (9:40 3200). Going sub-9 was obviously the goal and I felt I could have done so much better in this race. I had at the very least 5 seconds left in the tank. I still am getting used to racing again.
Ran my first 1500 in Fort Collins in 4:09 which is a big mile conversion PR of close to 10 seconds. Was very happy with the race.
Finished the season with a little time trial, running a 4:07 altitude conversion, which is the equivalent of about 4:24 in the mile, or a 4:23 1600. Doing that at 7000 feet was not much fun though.
This is a very brief and choppy recap of my short indoor and outdoor seasons. I feel I could have went MUCH faster in the 3k if I would have extended my season a bit more, and definitely could have gotten more out of the 1500 as well. At the same time, I didn’t want to get ahead of myself and played it conservative, shutting my season down early. It was my redshirt year and I got in some good racing experience which I feel was the most important thing I needed, especially after not having raced in such a long time.
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Now that the Summer base training has begun for what I hope will be a breakthrough year, I’m excited to start writing blog posts again. I am hoping to build up to a higher amount of mileage than I have ever done before as well as continuing to improve my lactate-threshold and develop my high-end aerobic system. I’ll detail tempo runs and long runs, easy days and hard days. The hope is that the end result will give me a chance to make a national-championship team, or simply to have a breakthrough cross-country season that will lead to bigger and better things throughout the year.
I hope you’ll be reading more as I feel the best things still lie ahead.
GO GRIZZLIES!
-John
