It’s week eleven, the homeschool state meet is in 12 days! Short email this week due to the cancelled race and track practice - we’ll cover:
1. Upcoming races including our home race
2. Our training for the week
3. The race calendar
4. Runspiration
Tuesday’s race: Home Race at Blackwood Farm Park
Click here to see the PDF info sheet for the race.
We’ll be racing Garner Homeschool and Chatham Thunder. As you all know - it’s hilly and not a particularly fast course, but a good challenge and a beautiful place to race. And we know every hill and bump on the course!
Time: 4pm MS girls, 4:30 MS boys, 5pm HS (boys/girls). Please arrive at least 45min early for your race and plan to stay for this whole meet - this is our first home meet!
A few more Reminders
1. Please update your child’s meet availability in the Stack App to help us better plan for each meet. Instructions for installing the app are at the bottom of this email.
2. Thanks again to Greg Milsom for https://chapelhillcheetahsxc.org. Please upload race photo here! Let us / know if you don’t want your child in publicly displayed photos.
Training
See the training spreadsheet for training plan details, terminology, and resources
We are just under two weeks out from the state meet! We begin to taper for the state race now. We’ll decrease both total volume and overall load while keeping some intensity and we’ll encourage our bodies to fully recover, strengthen, and be ready to perform at its peak come race day.
There are some actually pretty interesting studies of what happens in your body physiologically as you taper - bottom line is that you straight up get stronger and have more endurance. You don’t detrain, not this quickly - there isn’t enough time over these two weeks. This is really interesting paper (one of many) on the topic if you want learn more: https://bmjopensem.bmj.com/content/5/1/e000509
It’s important to NOT overdue it with running or other sports over the next few weeks (and keep eating and sleeping well, of course). This week won’t have a dramatic decrease in running yet, in fact we’ll do two hard efforts - the race, and then a tough, but slightly shorter, race specific track set on Thursday. But there will be no long run next weekend, and then only easy / sharpening / race prep runs next week before the state meet.
Monday (8-9am at Chapel Hill Bible)
Pre-race shake out. 20-30min of running w/ some strides.
Tuesday (race @Blackwood Farm Park)
Wednesday (8-9am at Chapel Hill Bible)
Post-race shake out: 20-30min running + strides
Thursday (4:30-6pm @Old Northern Track)
1-1.5mi WU (12min)
dynamics, wickets (4x)
2x strides to 90%
HS: 4x1000m w/ 400 active recovery (~3min). @ goal 5k pace (always correct for terrain)
MS: 4x800m w/ ~200-300m active recovery (~2.5min) @goal 2mi race pace (again, consider terrain).
Talk to coaches about race paces. This should be a very challenging set - but you shouldn’t feel like you are completely struggling in the first half, and you should finish working and breathing really hard on the last two, but feel like you could do a couple more repeats at that effort level without falling apart.
As I highlighted last week - checkout Sadie Engelhardt’s HS team do this workout (And frankly go too hard to try and make the times on that terrain) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Df3VqAeQZmA
Friday
(OPTIONAL)
Post track shakeout:
JV: 15-20min
V: 20-30min
4x strides to 90%
Saturday
No more long runs! Just an easy, steady run with a few surges mixed in.
JV: 25-35min w/ 4x20s surges at mile pace
V: 30-45min w/ 5x20s surges at mile pace
Sunday
Rest
Calendar
October 1st (Tuesday): Home Meet @Blackwood Farm Park! We need your help to run it!
October 11th (Friday): Homeschool State Meet @Ivey Redmon
October 19th (Saturday): NC Runner middle school only State Champ meet @Ivey Redmon: Top 7 boy/girl will be in the championship race, and then there are grade specific races for everyone else. Awards are presented to the top 15 in the champ heat, and top 10 in the others. Test yourself against the best! *** Please register in the app (I’ll add it there if it isn’t there yet) so I know who is going and can setup the teams!*** More info here: https://nc.milesplit.com/meets/580210-ncrunners-middle-school-xc-festival-2024
Runspiration
I think all the runspiration is up in the training section this week :).
In around the country racing news - the Nuttycombe Invite happened this past Friday in Wisconsin. Nuttybombe is one of the biggest mid-season college XC races. North Carolina runners performed exceptionally well with Parker Wolfe of UNC winning, and (NC native) Rocky Hansen of Wake Forest finishing second in the mens race as part of an exciting finish between the top six!
Nuttycombe Men: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUHT0ahlQ54
In dominating fashion, Sadie Sigfstead from Villanova ran away with the women’s title.
Nuttycombe Women: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmT_FeMbk08
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