Coach Daddy

For those of you following Alice’s running career, she ran a 13:38 3200 m race at the Regional meet, finishing 14th.  The girl who won ran a 10:18 for the second fastest 3200 in the nation this year.  The goal going in was to not get double lapped and she achieved that goal by a good 5 seconds.  All in all, the experience was pretty positive.  She got to school the catch the bus at 6 am, drove 3 hours south, sat around all day to race at 8:30 pm, then drove home with me, arriving home just after midnight.  We knew going in that she wasn’t going to qualify, so I think that the day of figuring out how to deal with that kind of situation without the pressure of having the qualify was good for her.  The experience will benefit her in a year or two when she does have a chance.  Also, it never hurts to run with some of the best high school runners in the nation (the girl who won has a twin sister who finished just 15 seconds behind her – they both ran 4:54 in the mile) when you’re in 7th grade.

Since track season is now over, Alice has been turned over to “Coach Daddy” to prepare for cross country season.  She’ll be traveling to St. Louis for a couple of weeks in June and we decided that would be a great time for a couple weeks off.  She’s also feeling highly motivated at this point.  So, we’ve jumped right into training.  I added her to my membership at the gym and we did some core training on Monday.  Tuesday was a tempo run at 7:40 pace.  Today was interval training.

Instead of standing there with my stopwatch, I came up with a new plan this time around.  Since her ideal 400 m interval time is 1:35 and mine is 1:25, I figured I’d just give her a 10 second head start, then chase her down.  She has really come a long way since our 400 m interval sessions in the winter where she struggled to hit 1:38 consistently.  Today, she ran all of her intervals at 1:30 or faster.  That made it harder on me, since I was pacing myself on the idea that I should catch her right at the finish.  So, here’s how I did:

400 m in 1:19

400 m in 1:21

400 m in 1:18

400 m in 1:19

400 m in 1:23

400 m in 1:14

The last one was just because I wasn’t going to let her beat me on all 6.  Unfortunately, she ran that last one in 1:26, so I had to push it to pass her.  It was pretty cool to have run the last interval sub 5 min/mile pace.  We jogged 400 m at about 10 min/mile pace in between intervals with a 1 mile warmup and cooldown.  Overall, it was a good workout for both of us.  I think the 10 second head start thing was a pretty good idea.  It allows us to push each other.