The St. Vrain Invitational on September 6 offered the first glimpse into how special this team could become.
Ten inches of snowfall in Colorado Springs on Sunday kept most of the girls indoors and resting. It will be interesting to see what an extra day of rest does for the team.
Normally Sunday is the designated rest day for the team, but we took Thanksgiving Day off, so our rest days are on a little different schedule going into NXN. At this point, I definitely won't lose sleep over a little extra rest--all the more so on a day when I couldn't have contact with the team, anyway.
Ten inches of snow on Sunday also means there weren't any nice places available to run on Monday. The solution? A father of one of the members of the boys' team arrives at school in the morning and fires up his snowblower. Pretty soon, we have two-plus lanes of track open--more than adequate for a little Monday speedwork. The team wasn't quite so pleased, though, with doing warm-up and cool-down running on the track. This is still cross country season, after all... well, sort of.
The workout was very crisp today--better even the last week's workouts. We haven't lost touch with our speed. We won't test it like this again until Saturday, however.
I also found out today that my team members read these articles I'm posting. In the middle of our muscle-activation exercises, I was informed by one of our co-captains that I'm no longer allowed to refer to myself as a "crusty old coach." I was a little flattered by that sentiment until Emily LaValley, our 300-hurdler-turned-cross-country-phenom, chimed in, "Yeah, you should refer to yourself as a bald old coach!" Emily, you should have learned last year about the payback on remarks like that.
I'm glad we're still laughing. It's too soon to be zoned.
Tomorrow, we get our team member back who has been gone on a trip since the evening of the NXN SW regional. The trip was planned long before she ever dreamed that we'd be going to Portland or that she would be part of the team going. Funny how life takes little turns. She's been running, but it will be great to be whole again as a team. To borrow a phrase, every teammate counts.
After practice, several of us gathered around the computer in my classroom and watched the 2007 NTN highlight video. Eleven minutes later, the excitement factor for going to Portland and "getting our mud on" had risen a notch or two. Having seen a couple runners from last year biff it over the hay bales, we understand better that it's not the end of the world if it happens to us. Enjoy the mud the moment you're down there, maybe splatter a little in your hair, get up, and get on.
It will be a blast to don the uniforms, get some mud on, and push ourselves to the brink.