Wednesday, October 05, 2011

HERDING CATS

Another year of coaching 3rd – 6th graders is in the books. Throughout the year we joked that it was like herding cats. It was definitely organized chaos, at best, when you have 37 kids and 2 coaches. We threw a lot of new stuff (games, relays, obstacle courses, etc.) at the kids this year in order to keep it fun. At times it’s really hard to get a feel for what they like and don’t like – especially given the rather large differences in age and abilities between our runners. After our last practice I got a very nice thank you card from one of our 6th graders. He mentioned how much he enjoyed running for us and much he’d miss it. He was very grateful for everything we taught him and said he’d be sure to use it throughout his “running career”. It was very touching.

I do try to share some “secrets” with the kids to help them improve, like running the tangents, keeping their effort up all the way over the hill, changing their stride to match the terrain – stuff like that. I feel like I can expand on this in the future, but I don’t want it to feel like I’m lecturing them either. I guess now that I know someone is listening and feels like it’s helpful information, I’ll try to add more next year.

In my last post I mentioned a glaring error on the Houston 2012 site. If you’re wondering what I was talking about, they listed results for 10,000km. It should be 10,000m or 10km – not 10,000km or 10m. I know it’s sad that; 1) I caught this in the first place, 2) it bothers me and 3) I blogged about it. But I have nothing better to do.

Running still has its ups and downs for me – and I’m not talking about the terrain. After a 34 mile week, I only ran once last week. I don’t even have an excuse why I didn’t run. This week I’ve run 6-7 miles every day. Both my knees have been achy. I’m wondering if it’s due to all the time off and my body getting used to the pounding again. The pain is the worst when I’m going up stairs.

Quote of the Day;

“You must be fast enough. You must have endurance. So you run fast for speed and repeat it many times for endurance.” – Emil Zatopek
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3 comments:

  1. Evan Roberts10/05/2011 1:54 PM

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  2. Evan Roberts10/05/2011 1:54 PM

    I laughed at the 10,000km qualification! You are not alone.

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  3. SteveQ10/06/2011 10:13 AM

    Sometimes I get embarrassed by the things that bother me. For example, the theme song to "The Big Bang Theory" has the line "the autotrophs began to drool,: and autotrophs, by definition, don't drool. Autotrophs (plants and some archaebacteria) make their own food, so they don't need to digest, thus they don't drool.
    It irritates me every time I hear it - and I must be the only one it bothers.

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