Hi Everyone!
Sorry for not doing a post yesterday it has been a wild week at work and I was waiting to get the map of the time trial results done before I posted. The map will be under important docs. If you were on a segment of the loop that’s multi directional I marked the direction you were going at the time you stopped.

The time trial looked awesome, this was really our first effort at what would be considered 5k pace. Right now in our training we’ve been doing a lot of work on either side of 5k effort so you’re not going to be very sharp for the 5k right now and that’s okay! This effort was about getting your feet wet and see where you’re coming into the season at with your 5k training. If you felt like you couldn’t go faster but then felt like you could have done more then you’re exactly where you want to be! Remember: racing never gets easier or less painful, but you do get better at it! The pros hurt just as much as you do. It’s hard to tell by watching them race because they look so relaxed but they’re in pain too, it’s all about learning to stay relaxed and calm when it starts to hurt.

On the endurance side of our training(everything slower than 5k pace) the goal has been to increase the amount of work you can do by training the system that clears fatiguing byproducts and uses them to produce energy, and by training the fuel system to prod. Also the higher mileage of the base phase strengthens your muscles, tendons and ligaments to handle the training ahead. It’s normal to come out of the base phase feeling a little stale from the grind of putting in longer slower miles, but staleness is easy to overcome with a couple of weeks of workouts while overtraining can take months to recover from. The next part is training the energy systems to produce energy at faster intensities(10k-3k work).

I look at our training like forging a sword. We’ve been working on all of the components that make the sword strong, then once we have a strong hunk of metal we work on polishing and sharpening the sword. If we try to sharpen the sword before it’s strong then it will break. You all have put in some awesome work since practices began and I’m looking forward to the road ahead.

See you at practice this evening, and if I don’t have and awesome weekend!