It’s been a week, and I still have so many nice memories of the MVXC Awards Banquet. It was so nice to see all of you and your families there! Thanks again to Sam’s parents, and so many others, who made that night special.
Attached is the presentation from our banquet. If you re-read this and have any questions, don’t hesitate to message me. I think we all deserve to have the best, most supportive situations we can create…our ancestors made big changes to improve their situations as well as ours. We can all engineer better and more supportive situations, too.
While I am at it, here are links to all the other presentations we had this season:
CharacterLab 2.1 – An Introduction to Grit: If MVXC has a Culture of Grit, it’s worth reviewing what the Queen of Grit herself, Angela Duckworth, has to say about the topic. This is always a good topic to lead off a school year and a cross country season!
CharacterLab 2.2 – Choices and Happiness: CharacterLab 2 tried to introduce insights from Dr. Barry Schwartz’ book, The Paradox of Choice. Barry feels that more choices and more freedom do not necessarily lead to more happiness and success. And, the way humans can make decisions is not always as reasoned as we might think. Here is the slide deck for the session on choice.
CharacterLab 2.3 – Gratitude. Of all the positive psychology interventions, gratitude interventions have the most impact on people’s happiness–both for the person who expresses gratitude as well as the person who is being thanked. Expressing our gratitude also is an opportunity to reflect on good things in our life. I think I will continue to refine this presentation on gratitude and repeat it every fall I am coaching at Monta Vista–it feels good to me, and to you, I believe.
Basic Nutrition: In case you thought that snacking on sea moss gathered off the coast of Zanzibar with air-fried jackfruit chips would make you faster tomorrow, the MVXC basic nutrition presentation might have cleared that up.
Leadership: We had a team meeting about leadership on November 7, where we talked about “reading the room” and trying to bring forward the best parts of ourselves to make a situation better. This is not always easy–sometimes when we want to celebrate and another person is sad, it’s hard to hold back; and the other side, when we are hurting but other people want to get rolling with a workout or talk about how well a race went, it’s hard to get up and celebrate with them. I do want you to be your authentic selves, and I do want you to come to your teammates and to me to share both your happy and sad feelings, positive and negative feelings, or insights, or thoughts…we can all share better when we read the room to improve our timing of when to chime in, and with what. Here is the read the room slide deck.
Winter Training: For our last major get-together before winter, Coach Flatow introduced a brief history of training theory and provided some suggestions on how to keep our training momentum from MVXC25 into MVTF26–or wherever your running would take us next.
