With three weeks of practice under our belts, we get a week’s break from school. Hopefully our athletes will not take a week’s break from training!
Whether you have been diligent in training during winter or just set aside your Playstation when the first day of track practice showed up on your calendar, the first few weeks are tough. As Edrick Floreal (Coach John’s coach at Stanford would say), there is ‘being in shape, and there is being in track-shape’. These are very different things. MVTF athletes are now well on the way to being in track-shape. Those first few weeks can be hard, and athletes had some times of soreness, but athletes also made a lot of progress and their fitness improved. Sitting around and not exercising during break week might feel nice but athletes also lose a lot of fitness, fast–and could come back to practice on the next Monday and feel like they are starting over almost from the beginning again. That’s a horrible feeling! So please, please keep training during the break week!
Your event coach can give you a training plan if you are traveling. Find a place to train every day. If you are staying around Cupertino, we are going to help you by hosting optional (but highly recommended) group practices. Coach John will be at the track with Coach Stephanie on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday at 3:30pm. Coach Stephanie will tentatively be on the track on Monday at 3:30pm. Coach Ray and Coach Heen have yet to set their schedules. Coach Flatow will be back East for a track meet, to visit some college coaches and drop in on a couple of your ‘big sisters’ but the distance runners have a training schedule below; endurance athletes can join the rest of the team at 3:30 to run and have access to the core-training and stretching equipment, or run in smaller groups independently each day.
Coach Irina has some flexibility in her schedule next week; particularly if you have a group of three to six people who could use some special attention from Coach Irina, please let us know as soon as you can and we will see if she can come and work with you and make you stronger.
Please don’t hesitate to ask your coach if you have any questions about what you should be doing during break week! We want you all to come back strong and ready to build on those first three weeks of training–and ready to crush at Rustbuster!
Coach
