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Week 3 – November 7th thru 13th

House Keeping Notes

1. Saturday Group Training for the Winter – 7:30 am
2. Mark Your Calendars - CRC/Boulder Striders Xmas Party on December 10th
3. Club X-C Champs – Congrats to our Ladies…1st Team 40-49 (Terzah/Nikki/Lara/Kathy)

Monday 7th               Cross Train Day

                               Lift Weights/Pilates (Mat or Reformer)/Yoga – 45 to 60 minutes

Tuesday 8th              Easy/Light Run 40 minutes

                               Include 5 x 30 sec light strides/60 sec easy within run

                               Do Light Strides after 20 minutes of Running

Wednesday 9th          Light Fartlek Workout 

                               Meet @ East Boulder Rec - 6:30 am OR Potts Field - 5:30 pm

                               PLEASE BRING A HEADLAMP – Evening Group

                               Warm Up 10-15 min/Stretch/4 x 30 sec strides

                               3 x (2/4/2 min combo)…run as follows

                               run 2 min @ 10 km effort with 60 sec easy

                               run 4 min @ half marathon effort with 2 min easy

                               take 2 min active rest after first set

                               Cool Down 5-10 minutes

Thursday 10th           Easy Recovery Run 40 minutes

                               Plyo’s Class @ CAC-Flatirons – 6:00 pm

Friday 11th               Cross Training Day

                               Lift Weights/Pilates (Mat or Reformer)/Yoga – 45 to 60 minutes

Saturday 12th            Continuous Tempo Workout from Tom Watson Park @ 7:30 am

                               Warm Up 10-15 min/Stretch/4 x 30 sec strides

                               4 x 7 min continuous tempo…run as follows:

                               run 5 min @ half marathon pace

                               run 2 min @ long run pace

                               there are no recovery breaks here…continuous 28 minutes of running

                               Cool Down 5-10 minutes

Sunday 13th             Easy Long Run – 75 minutes

                               Relaxed Pace/Hydrate on the Run

                               Easy 5 min Walk Cool Down

Easy/Light/Recovery Run - Conversational Pace/Relaxed Effort

Long Run – 60-90 sec Slower than your Marathon Goal Pace

Tempo/Sustained - Run between 70-80% Effort of Max

Fartlek – Playing with Fast/Slow Speed

Hills - Work on Good Form (drive with arms/relax the shoulders/get up on toes/quick

          turnover/mid-foot strike on the downs/look 5-10 feet in front of yourself)

Active Rest – Walk/Slow Run Recovery

Meeting Places

East Boulder Rec - follow Baseline east to 55th St. Take a right on 55th and follow the road until the sharp left turn and go past the first parking lot and tennis courts towards the Rec Center. Park on the West Side of the Rec Center Parking Lot close to the tennis courts.

Potts Field – CU Outdoor Track between Foothills Parkway and 30th off of Colorado Avenue

Tom Watson Park - follow the Diagonal Highway to 63rd Street. Go north on 63rd for about a half mile and look for the sign saying Tom Watson Park on your right. Parking Lot is opposite Coot Lake on east side of 63rd Street. DO NOT park @ Coot Lake.

Coach's Notes

Following up from where I left off last week and an athlete’s ability to deal with their mindset, preparation and performance…we all know that GENETIC ABILITY is involuntary…while PERFORMANCE plays a significant role in the outcome on any given day and SACRIFICE is a choice which doesn’t necessarily come that easily.

SACRIFICE is what we will focus on here as it is not typically an enjoyable experience. It can imply loss. Runners make sacrifices to pursue their training and racing goals. Time with family and friends, money, giving up ones favorite food or beverage for a period of time. These are things we give up to some extent because we are devoting so much time and energy to our running and these are times we will never get back. We deem these sacrifices to be worthwhile, because the ultimate reward of performance makes them so. But to help make these sacrifices palatable, the reward cannot reside only in the destination. The journey must provide us some sense of achievement, or enjoyment as well. This is where fun enters into the equation.

Sacrifice and Fun are the yin and yan of running improvement. They appear as polar opposites, yet in reality cannot exist without each other. Sacrifice without fun could lead to an eventual situation where the body begins to fail to respond to the applied physical load, despite perfect restoration. This may sound like a crazy concept, as inputs should provide outputs, but the human body is complex, and even perfect inputs without enjoyment will not provide the performance that the inputs promise. Both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations fail to arouse athletes who are too focused on the details of their training without taking the time to make some of it fun. The ultimate goal of any runner’s training should be to use as much training detail and sacrifice as possible, while still making sure that training remains enjoyable-pick your battles and know where details and sacrifice are most critical for you. Detail without fun and fun without detail, while effective in creating a fit and functioning athlete, will only result in an athlete who is a mere fraction of who they could be.

Keeping training fun while still considering the need for detail is no easy task and so thinking outside the box and looking for opportunities in areas we may not normally see are imperative. A good starting point is to make sure that our initial mind-set is appropriate. Training is little more than the application of stress over time. We control the faucet on how that stress is applied, and must see it for what it is. Fun can be easily applied to training if we view training as the management of a runner’s stress budget. Inherent in this is the idea that stress can come in many different flavors. To think along these lines, we need to veer away from the detail-oriented mind-set that workouts are the catalyst for performance, and into the mind-set of maintaining the “spirit of the workout”.

If we all keep an open-mind to our training and go into workouts and letting things unfold, not only will we gain improvement, but one can have fun doing it.