Friday – 10.6 on the Rock Creek Trail.
Saturday – zero miles for my fourth day off this year. I was just too cooked after being at the BOCO meet up in Longmont all day. I was sacked out in bed just a tad after 8. It was one of those days where I could have gone out and thrashed for 2 or 3 miles just to avoid a zero, but I would not have got much out of it other than some mental satisfaction that would be offset with disappointment in the run. More on the meet below.
Sunday – 15.2 on the Rock Creek Trail. I didn’t feel so hot, and then it started to get hot so I began to falter a bit in the second half, but even when I pop on these runs like that, I tend to still hold the sub 8 pace. I guess that is a good sign of the last 15 weeks of getting regular stuff in.
Another 70 week (in six days of running), but hardly anything beyond regular aerobic runs. No need to revisit how that is a problem as I have already covered that here.
On Saturday I spent the day up at the Boulder County Championships up in Longmont. We had some kids perform well, and some kids come up short of expectations. JZ was one of them. He looked flat, and while he was able to manage that a fairly well in a 4 x 8 leg, he got walloped pretty good in the 3200 later in the day.
One of the things that I think makes a person an expert in their field is pattern recognition. Be they are a doctor, or a software programmer or a military strategist, they can “see the future” before it happens because they recognize patterns of success or failure before those things actually happen. I could see that JZ was going to have a tough 3200 in the first lap of his race. His arm swing was off in a way that happens when he is struggling, and you could see he was flailing a bit. You can see something like this with all the kids when they are a little off, and you start to recognize that pattern.
Another pattern I have been recognizing is the “the last 1 percent.” If an athlete does not take care of that last 1 percent, it can have a pretty profound effect on their performances. High school kids recognize this to different degrees, and for some it is a long lesson for them to learn. Recognizing what they eat, what they do to manage their sleep, how long they sit in the sun before their races, and their mental state … it probably actually all adds up to a lot more than 1 percent … but those things are game changers for a high performing athlete. That is ridiculously obvious – right? But not necessarily to the a 15-18 year old kids. This is not only true for their races and competitions, but how they approach practice. If they approach practice on top of that last percent, they are going to have a better practice and thus ultimately perform better. And if they come under that percent, they are going to have a poorer practice and thus are likely to perform more poorly.
Take a 2 minute 800 meter kid … that is a 120 second effort. In the 5A ranks in Colorado, a 2 minute 800 does not get you into the state meet. But if you perform 1 percent better … or 1.2 seconds faster, you are now a 1:58.8 kid, and you are right at that number 18 spot that gets you in.
I think JZ is figuring some of these things out. Maybe not. It is not easy always for us to recognize what we do outside of a race or a practice has an impact even hours, days or weeks later. It probably holds true that his old man is still trying to figure out these sort of things for himself despite being 3 decades his senior.
But the pattern I recognized in myself that was the loudest over the weekend was seeing the satisfaction I had when a kid was able to meet their expectations (or say PR) versus the disappointment when they came up short. And really how much of that disappointment was on me. It felt like I had come up short for the athlete in preparing them … a logical part of me knows that is not completely true of course. I recognize I am not articulating this part well here, but that reflects the mix of feelings, thoughts, and responses that in my head and heart on this topic. When a kid I coach does not do well, I can see patterns where I think I did not do something to prepare that kid to do their best, but at the same time I recognize there are things they are doing that also impact that. It also holds true when they do well – I can see where they have risen to be something better than what they were before in terms of athletic performance, and being a little part of the team that helped them get there is hugely satisfying.
All of that … I love the process this represents on so many levels … dedicating yourself to a craft for hours on a week for an effort that will take you only minutes, learning from your successes and failures, trying to be a better person physically, mentally than what you were the day before …
