Interview with angelina ramos – unlv cross country coach January 18, 2021 0 1 Thank you for taking some questions from the Colorado Coyotes Youth Running Club. Can you first tell us about yourself, your background as a runner, and your coaching career? I grew up in New York and New Jersey and went to high school in the southwest corner of Connecticut. I started running because my family had just moved for the 13th time and I didn’t know anyone in the new town. A girl asked me if I would go out for the cross country team with her during my freshman year of high school in order that she would not be the only new girl going out for the team. I didn’t even know what cross country was, but I said yes because I needed to make some friends. I showed up the first day in jeans and high-top sketcher sneakers, expecting it to be like “syllabus week” where you just get to know everyone the first day and review the season plan, but don’t do any actual work yet. Come to my surprise, light-up sneakers and skin-tight jeans or not, I was asked to run four miles on day one, through which I got lost, and the team captain had to come back and find me. It was a rough start. I was drawn to the team and the coach, whose militaristic approach and high expectations were something I needed at that point in my life. I was one of the worst ones on the team and those initial races, I couldn’t finish a 4k cross country race without stopping to walk a few times mid-race. I ran every day that summer, sometimes twice a day, and came back my sophomore year to discover I had gone from being the worst on the team to the best on the team and ran my way into all-state positions. I quickly learned that in this sport, you get out of it what you put into it. By my senior year, I was determined to compete at the NCAA Division I level and learn from some of the best in the sport, as well as being pushed by them too. I wanted a coach that would let me run both cross country and track collegiately, as my track 400m/800m marks were much stronger comparatively than my 4,000m cross country marks. The courses in New England are incredibly hilly, and Connecticut is a smaller state so you can run slower times than the rest of the country but be ranked fairly high in the state and have a disillusioned view of where you actually rank compared to the rest of the nation. Trained as a 400m runner who stepped up to the 800m in high school, and only having raced the mile a handful of times, always doing standing recovery between intervals, highly explosive weight room training, lots of hills, and lower mileage volume, I was in for a huge culture shock when I transitioned to Florida State’s distance training that included some monster workouts that freshman season, such as 6 mile- long-continuous workouts of alternating mile repeats with jogging recovery in-between each. I loved my time at Florida State. Tallahassee is often called Trail-a-hassee and has some of the most beautiful training grounds around. We were one of Bob Braman’s first recruiting classes when he took over that program, and Bob taught us to always be students of the sport as well. He used to have team meetings and would give us handouts from Jack Daniels pyramids and teach us about exercise physiology once a week. He imparted a love of teaching. So many Florida State graduates have gone on into coaching and that’s because Coach Braman does a phenomenal job imparting his passion for the sport to those he works with, and you graduate retaining that passion and love of the sport. During our two week break between seasons when coaches would tell us to take time away and not think about track, I would come back the very next day to the track and tell the coaches I didn’t want to be away from it for two weeks, that I loved it too much. Coach Jackie (Richards) would hand me a stopwatch and appoint me as her assistant coach for those two weeks and allow me to learn from her while she guided the sprinters during that time. Unfortunately, despite the best intentions of the coaching staff, I incurred a lot of injuries my freshman and sophomore year, ranging from frequent bilateral tibial stress fractures, having jumped from about 15-20 miles per week in high school to 45-65 miles per week my freshman year of college. In my junior year, I struggled with anemia and vitamin D deficiency, amongst subluxations of the spine and hip malalignments. It was a long road before I got back to my high school times before I started breaking through them and earning personal best marks again. My senior and super senior year, our head coach (who was also our distance coach for the men and women) hired in a women’s cross country and distance track coach (Karen Harvey) and she transitioned the team from having a huge injury percentage at any given time to practically having zero athletes injured for the entire year, and catalyzed everyone’s performances and motivation by leaps and bounds. It really opened my eyes to the influence and effect one person can have on the same group of athletes and the same level of talent before them. The FSU cross country team went from being ranked in the top 30 in the nation to 4th in the nation in one year, and my teammate (Hannah England) ran the NCAA 1500m national championship meet record that year as well. When I graduated FSU in 2008, 25 of my teammates went on to compete at the Beijing Olympics representing a plethora of countries (ranging from Lacey Janson, USA, pole vault to Walter Dix in the sprints to Susan Kuiken for the Netherlands to Barbara Parker in the steeplechase to Hannah England in the 1500m), etc. There were also many of us who graduated feeling we had unfinished business, and wondered what if we had benefited from Coach Karen Harvey for four to five years versus just our last year—what could we have achieved? Regret is extremely painful—looking back now, I also saw that my perfectionism hurt me and that my late nights of no sleep fighting for a 4.0 GPA and insisting on trying to repeat my high school patterns of being involved in multiple clubs and groups left me stretched too thin collegiately. From being a sponsorship chair for Relay for Life to FSU’s SAAC (student-athlete advisory committee) representative for the track team, I had a habit of taking on too much, never sleeping or resting enough, and as a coach, I look back and see that I didn’t fully grasp how to set myself up for success or how to focus on one singular goal versus ten at once. I think that everybody deserves to have their shot and to have peace and calm around the question of knowing how good they can be and what they can achieve or what marks they can accomplish if they have a coach that fully believes in them and invests their entire selves and souls into their journey and if they, too, as an athlete and human can fully invest in themselves to meet their coach half-way to see what they are capable of. I absolutely loved the sport and was driven to coach others and desperately wanted each of my athletes to be able to graduate from the sport and feel calm in their hearts that they were given guidance in every possible category—nutrition, sleep, injury-minimization, sport science, sport psychology, tactics, race strategy, strength and conditioning, and more—and that if they chose to, they were able to see what they were capable of when fully believed in and provided individualized focus. I think everyone deserves to have their moment and to pursue mastery over this beautiful, phenomenal sport, and grow motivated by that process. I learned a lot from being a sports journalist for Trackshark.com through the years, interviewing coaches and athletes alike, along with being a medical assistant for sports doctors in Colorado, working at the (then) best retail run-technical store in the USA (Boulder Running Company when it was owned privately by Marc Plaatjes and when Henry Guzman was the store buyer). I pursued every professional development opportunity I could, ranging from strength and conditioning certifications to sports psychology and movement science scores. These experiences furthered my background as a coach and strengthened what I could offer my athletes. How have you and the team been handling the COVID-19 situation? I assume most of your runners went home, did some stay in Las Vegas to train? About 2/3 of the 45-person track and field team has gone home to live with their parents. The track and field squad halted their technical training and followed a strength and conditioning protocol issued through the Train Heroic app for the remainder of the track and field season. The distance and mid-distance squad kept training and I was able to administer that training via a shared excel google document, individualizing that training based upon where each athlete went home to and what training resources they had there and what training culture/environment they were in. A few parents were uncomfortable with their daughter training during the initial few weeks, and of course, all training was optional and not mandatory. One of my athletes in Philadelphia staying with family hasn’t been able to run at all, whereas others in more rural parts of Colorado, Hawaii, Vermont, Virginia, and California were able to safely run socially distanced from anyone else, and maintain that aspect of both mental and immune health within their routine, as well as stay engaged towards longer-term goals. The ones that stayed in Las Vegas included a combination of athletes who perhaps held jobs they wanted to stay working with while others, such as athletes from Europe, were concerned about the ability to return in August to start masters programs or be back in time for the cross country season if they went home, as travel protocols further out were unpredictable. The university had shut down completely including facility closures, and all classes were transitioned to online learning. The athletes received continued support throughout the semester from their athletic trainer, a sports psychologist, nutritionist, academic advisors, and more through platforms such as Zoom and of course, phone/face-time. We had weekly team meetings via zoom to stay connected as a squad under the leadership of program director Yvonne Wade, who was an Olympian for team Japan and All-American for the University of Colorado, Boulder. Coach Yvonne would also invite former UNLV track and field/cross country alumni to join the zoom team calls to tell their story and share where they are now, ranging from athletes who are newscasters and media announcers to those who just graduated law school despite tons of adversity faced while being a student-athlete. During those team zoom meetings, the team was also presented to by the University team doctor where athletes could ask any questions they had about coronavirus in order to dispel myths and distinguish fact from fiction, as well as they could ask sports supervisors and even their athletic director, who sat in on a few calls, about policy changes through the quarantine. It provided a lot of transparency in order to calm those athletes with high-anxiety and kept them connected to each other as well. What’s it like to coach cross country and distance runners in Las Vegas? I’m guessing the heat becomes an issue during the cross country season, but the mild winters make it easier for students to train during the winter? I’m guessing you practice in the morning? Las Vegas weather is perfect for distance runners from about that first week of October through the end of April, early May, which is the majority of the NCAA cross country and track and field season, ranging from 45-65 degrees in the morning when we train to about 75 degrees mid-day, and cooling off in the evening once the sun goes down. June through August is pretty brutal! Extreme heat training, extreme humidity, extreme dry training, and extreme altitude training all provide perks to training and challenge an athlete both mentally and physically—but all take a period of adaptation and adjustment, and need to be met with informed decision making on how to execute training design protocol through it. In the fall we practice during that 6 am-9 am time block, and in the spring, while I stagger different athlete groups on hard workout days, it’s mostly 7 am-11 am during the indoor/outdoor season. I think people forget that UNLV is in the mountain west conference for a reason. We can get to 8,000 feet high altitude trail runs in deciduous forest in a 45-minute drive from campus. We can drive 20 minutes and be running in mountain foothills on undulating terrain the whole way. Around campus, there are tons of parks we use during the week, but Friday/Saturdays we drive a bit further out and really take advantage of the training resources we are surrounded by. I also assistant coach with professional elite coach Brad Hudson. Brad used to be based out of Colorado and I’ve known him for years and have worked with him plenty in the past. He is based out of Texas now and guides Rogue Running down there, but he has a team of post-collegiate marathon-specific athletes (Las Vegas Gold) that train out of Las Vegas, that I assistant coach and oversee, and a few whose training I guide completely (1500-5k runners). For the marathoners’ long runs, I’m biking alongside them and they’re taking fluids every 3-4 miles, and alternating between water and an electrolyte source like Maurten or body armour or Gatorade. They’re taking carbohydrates before 60 minutes, and I’m offering ice cubes or frozen grapes or splashes of water on their hats or over their backs sporadically across a run. It’s hot for sure, but when training is implemented in a smart way, it’s very doable. That group includes Olympic trials qualifiers in the marathon on the men’s and women’s side, and there’s a huge triathlon training scene in Las Vegas as well. Those athletes can have success out here for a reason—there are great training grounds out here for distance runners. UNLV does not have a men’s cross country or track program, how long has that been the case? I noticed that University of Nevada added men’s cross country in 2018, do you think UNLV will be able to add men’s cross country at some point? Unfortunately, none of the state schools in Nevada offer men’s track and field, and UNLV has never offered men’s cross country or track and field. University athletic directors can choose to balance 75 scholarships on a football team and basketball roster numbers however they like. At some universities, it’s by offering a women’s swim and dive team but not a men’s, at others, it’s with golf and tennis programs. At UNLV, it happens to be by having a women’s track and field and cross country team, but not a men’s. I do not think UNLV will add a men’s cross country team in the near future—they would have to add another women’s sports team first in order to balance the gender numbers by the add. There is some great talent in-state and I’ve loved creating strong relationships with those high school coaches who feel comfortable to call and ask for guidance in helping their top male athletes continue the sport who simply want to pick my brain about where they ought to consider and what factors they might take into account. UNLV doesn’t have to have a men’s program in order to provide guidance to high school coaches and support their encouraging athletes to stay in the greatest sport around (our sport). Looking at your roster, UNLV has a large team, 32 runners listed on the website roster. I’m thinking this is higher than most D1 schools, does that mean you’re more flexible with the additional runners than other programs? When you travel to meets, how many runners do you typically take? We don’t actually have 32 athletes who are actively training to race a 5k/6k. It’s actually quite common for 400m runners to include a 20 minute run in their training regimen during base phase and pre-season. Last year program Director Yvonne Wade partnered with a few charities to host a Color Run on-campus in order to fundraise for great causes. Our whole team participated in the weekend event, and all of our 400m runners finished the 5k road-race. Many 400m athletes will often do things like participate in a cross country race during the pre- season, or do hill work with our distance squad, but aren’t actively training to race the 6k at conference ever. Some of the 400/800 group is actively training to eventually race a 5k/6k in cross country well, but others simply train from a strength background but my plan for them long-term does not include blazing a 6k but might need to incorporate the hill work. This upcoming cross country season, our current plan includes four pre-season meets with no squad size limits to the race fields, which provides lots of opportunity for athletes to step up. With that said, a coach’s job is to both challenge athletes and push them outside of their comfort zone, and balance that with building confidence. Part of that happens in the selecting of where an athlete opens up for their first 6k race experience—it has to be a strong fit for building that athlete and empowering them based on where they’re at in their development process. For next year’s roster, there’s about 15 athletes that I would categorize as 1500m-10k runners, with the rest as 400m/800m athletes. Of those 400m/800m athletes, four of them have become pretty darn proficient at running cross country, and have made monumental improvement each year in that area, whereas the others thrive may train with the squad, but not necessarily even want to ever race a 6k. I’m very picky with who I accept onto the team from a culture standpoint, and with who stays on the team with regard to a culture standpoint. You become like the five people you spend the most time around. Athletes ought to feel safe within their tribe as well versus threatened. Being around people who want to work at a high level and who can be happy for the success of their teammates is also critical. An athlete has to be a culture fit to earn a roster spot at UNLV. A coach also always has to balance the roster between athletes who are ready to score points at the conference, regional, and national level right away, and those athletes who are still developing to those levels. Who they recruit and allow a roster spot on a given year always has to do with keeping that in balance, and on who else may have just graduated out from the program and who is coming in the following year. With your Colorado ties, I was surprised you didn’t have more women on the team from Colorado. Do you still follow Colorado high school running and keep in contact with your connections, especially at a powerhouse school like Niwot? I’ve been coaching at UNLV since mid-September of 2018. This means that fall 2019 saw my first incoming recruits which included an athlete from Colorado along with athletes from Vermont, Hawaii, Nevada, California, Alabama and Virginia. My incoming class for 2020 includes multiple athletes from Colorado, along with athletes from New Mexico, California, Michigan, Utah, and Nevada. [Due to NCAA rules during covid19 on communication, I can’t list them specifically]. I follow Colorado high school running incredibly closely, especially given that I was the former Niwot high school coach, Metro State coach, Ric Rojas Running Club Coach, coached Superior Track and Field youth program under Amy Manson, Active at Altitude run camps under Terry Chiplin, the Boulder Tri-Babes, Revolution Running/ Bold Running/ Run Revolution, was an intern under the elite athlete coordinator for the Bolder Boulder 10k, coached athletes in recovery for Phoenix Multisport’s athletes training for the Bolder Boulder 10k, and more. I was faculty at the University of Colorado Boulder, an integrative physiology academic advisor there in which I also academic advised a number of CU’s NCAA runners during that time, and a presentation coach for the real estate case competition team program. I’ve been a keynote speaker countless times for high school programs across Colorado and have coached at a number of summer running camps as well. I’ve got a lot of roots in Colorado and have coached every level there, and am deeply immersed in multiple culture bubbles there of the sporting community—I stay in touch with many of those I coached alongside as well as competitively against with the deepest respect for their work, and follow what the athletes are doing closely. Coaches who have never coached or trained at altitude often don’t understand the value of the athletes’ performances at high altitude and how tough some of the courses can be (such as the Colorado state cross country course). I recruit heavily from altitude programs, especially as the mountain west conference meet is held at altitude for both cross country and indoor conference many years, but also because I see how mentally tough so many Colorado runners are. That’s the nature of distance running—taking pain. It doesn’t matter how physiologically fit you are if you aren’t ready to race between the ears and if you aren’t willing to run towards the pain versus from it. A lot of Colorado athletes deal with crazy weather but also altitude adversity and tough terrain. There’s a grittiness that comes with that and I specifically recruit for that mindset and how an athlete approach’s training, how they response to failure and adversity, and how they handle when the race gets tough or what they do when an athlete goes by them that they don’t expect—that’s when character gets exposed. When recruiting prospective runners to UNLV, what do you look for and what’s the draw to UNLV? I’m also curious as to how you view progress, do you worry about girls who were injured a lot in high school or who have not showed steady progress during their career? I just touched on this in the last question, but their mental make-up is a coach component of what is being recruited with a distance runner, how they handle pain, their resilience to adversity in the process, and their competitiveness. Additionally, I look at how they treat referees, how they communicate with their coach, how they celebrate their teammates. Where they may fall on the leadership scale if it’s a particular year when I need to recruit in a more vocal leader or perhaps another year where I need a leader by example in the squad. I’m curious as to the story surrounding athletes who had a lot of injury in high school—was that due to mental health, to nutrition, to eating disorders, hormone changes (birth control choices for example), to poor shoe choices, to multiple coaching changes and lack of consistency, high increases in volume and intensity simultaneously, and more. There are so many factors. An athlete who has been inconsistent doesn’t get written off or overlooked—it simply becomes a question within the process. Understanding a past history of injury helps prevent repetition from going forward. Some of those athletes become diamonds once they can finally get a string of consistency going. In recruiting, I look for whether an athlete is truly into the sport or not. I look for if they know their why and if they’re running for them and because they love the process, and make sure it’s not a case of the parents being more into it than they are, or to do it for trying to earn parent love/approval/recognition. I look at if they can self-motivate during time away from the team and coach, because in NCAA, there might be five weeks off from classes during the winter break or multiple months in the summer that you don’t see your coach that you go back home to train, and I need to be able to count on you to be dependable to your teammates to do the work and to exhibit honest communication about this time in order to avoid injuries and engage in planned gradual improvement across time with consistent deposits of work ethic to the body bank. I look at whether an athlete is a bully to others and assess their emotional intelligence and emotional maturity. I look at their ability to take feedback or coaching from their high school coach. I also look at who is actually coaching them and what they’ve accomplished given the training that they’d had and what level of guidance. An athletes’ communication skills during the recruitment process also affect their recruitability. Ultimately, it’s about connection. It has to be a good fit between coach and athlete, where there’s a draw and desire to work together to achieve more out of someone than they could on their own. Trust starts in the recruiting process. What’s your opinion on the status of girl’s high school running? Do you feel that most of the girls coming into UNLV are adequately prepared to run at the collegiate level? From the state of Nevada, no, most aren’t. From other states, yes, definitely. The depth of high school girls’ running has catalyzed, especially after athletes like Sarah Baxter, Jordan Hasay, Elise Cranny, Katie Rainsberger, Alexa Efraimson, Mary Cain, Jordyn Colter, and more came through and inspired entire generations that followed them. They, each in their own way, shattered ceilings of what could be done and how it could look. High school and club coaches are more educated now that a few decades ago, and/or are engaging in holistic life coaching versus simply single-season guidance for these phenoms. There are more resources now than ever before. I’ve had the privilege of seeing first-hand quality camps like those hosted by Melody Fairchild for middle and high school girls that empower, inform, and educate them and provide them both the camaraderie of their unique hero’s journey and perspective for their individual experiences for the years to come, and that they’ll have each other and role models like Mel to lean on through it, regardless of how that first year unfolds. With that said, there is still tons of room for girls’ high school running to grow and improve. Adolescence is a time when girls’ self-efficacy, self-esteem, and ability to self-advocate can either plummet or thrive exponentially, or become stagnant by ignoring their existence. I think we can empower high school girls in this arena so that their communication skills with their collegiate coaches is stronger. I think we can help high school girls get in touch with their emotions, desires, and ownership over what they want so that they’re confident in decision-making and in choosing a program as well as a person they want to be led by from these places of strong-will and clarity. I think athletes from low-mileage and high-mileage programs can be “ready to compete” at the division I level immediately as long as their coaches implement an athlete-focused approach for them versus event-focused, that is tailored to the athlete in front of them and their particular background and needs. High school running programs can improve in how we advise athletes on transitioning from big fish in a small pond to a big heart in a larger ocean, de-stigmatizing “asking for help” with everything from mental health to vulnerability, and more. That’s our sports culture as a whole though, not limited to high school running, but as this is the sport’s foundation for so many youth, our roots and initial experiences in the sport matter more than ever with our first impressions. I’ve been a high school coach before (Niwot High School and Ric Rojas Running Club) and understand the struggles of trying to provide everything to very large groups, keep the environment fun, and offer a high-level experience simultaneously. With that said, intention is everything. Improving movement patterns and overall athleticism before adding mileage would be immensely helpful at the high school level for both genders to decrease injuries later on, because a gait that doesn’t hurt an athlete at 35 miles per week suddenly can at 55 miles per week. Equally, the sprinter or mid-distance runner that is always in the lead in high school might get away with mechanics that they could get hurt with if they over-stride in over to compete against someone faster than them. There is more information out there now more than ever, between Letsrun.com, the internet, pro-athlete Instagrams, and Flotrack Workout Wednesday. I don’t think high school athletes know how to filter that information and extract what is appropriate or applicable to them. I think understanding that process as well as learn not to get caught up in comparison just because one is competitive is crucial during high school in order to thrive that first year collegiately. Can you tell us about your training philosophy? What type of training are your top women doing in terms of mileage and their long run? What type of strength training do you implement at UNLV and how often are the women lifting weights? I believe nothing is more important than team culture, and I believe in training the athlete versus the event, and teaching athletes to embody a growth mindset and pursue mastery over their sports’ skillsets as well as mastery over their own mind versus urging perfectionism. I believe in meeting athletes where they’re at—physically, emotionally, mentally—and growing them from there. Our team mantras are ohana, courage, and character. It means nobody gets left behind or forgotten—If I recruited you, I have a vision for you, I see something in you, and we are a team and it’s on me to extract that out of you. If you fail, there’s another skill set I need to give you or develop in you, failure is simply feedback. If you succeed, that’s all your glory, if you fail, we fail together. I’m always with them vulnerable too when they race. Ohana means if a teammate gets sick, injured, has a family emergency, no matter what happens, I don’t just recruit over them or stop counting on them to be a dependable, contributing member to this team as long as they’re meeting me half-way too. Ohana means I’m not going to give up on you, and your team is your sisters and they won’t either. You’re a part of something, you belong to something, this is your tribe. Courage means a willingness to execute the plan and “win the day” for you in that particular race or workout, and being willing to put yourself out there, both in the process as well as in day-of-competition. And character is everything—who an athlete is to their teammates matters just as much as how they show up for their teammates as well as for themselves. Athletes are always in-media-res of learning who they are better and better each year, and constantly evolving—I want them to be intentional in the cultivation of their character and improve in emotional intelligence through the years along with their mindset mastery. Especially in cross country, when you’re racing for your singlet, you race with the power of everyone who wore that singlet before you and all those that will come after—it becomes a hive mindset and you grow capable of achieving something more than you could individually. That doesn’t just happen on race day… that is nurtured and constructed through time together and over a process. Our women’s team lifts three times a week if we don’t have a meet that week for most of the squad, some athletes twice a week. I got to UNLV in September of 2018—at that point, most of the squad was comprised of middle-distance athletes, so no one’s mileage was drastically high. I’ve recruited in a versatile class, so now we have more depth in every event from 400/800m up through 10,000m. At past programs I’ve coached at, I’ve had athletes ranging from 15 miles per week (800m/400m) through those at 75-90 miles per week (5,000m/10,000m). It really just depends on the athlete. At the last program I coached at in Michigan, I had a pair of twins who both ran the 400 and 800m. One twin would run 45 miles per week and was an NCAA runner-up, could solo-lead a race through prelims in the 800m and split 2:07 by herself, third at cross country conference, 4:40 on a DMR mile leg, and 56 in the 4×4, while the other twin could also run 2:10 open and 55 on the 4x4R, but was training at 15 miles per week and had come from a multi background and 300m hurdle background in high school. They were completely different humans—one was allergic to every fruit and vegetable and her body and the immune system broke down easily and she was a 4.0 GPA occupational therapy student who stressed over every exam upcoming so I trained her extremely differently than her twin. They both had high-level success and improved a ton from their high school and early college days. At UNLV, I’ve had a 10k runner in the 65 mile per week range along with 400m/800m runners who range from 55 miles per week to 12 miles per week depending on the athlete. I don’t like junk mileage. Athletes use their best version of their form when they’re running fast. They use their worst version of their form under extreme fatigue at the end of a long run… If I up an athletes’ mileage or increase their long run, I’m always watching what they look like finishing that long run and how they’re adapting to that increase in mileage. I’ve had athletes who ran 45 miles per week in high school but they ran a ton of miles at 8:30-8:50/mile pace and they were exhausted through a lot of races. They come to UNLV, and I bring them down to 30-35 miles per week but they’re running easy runs off their perceived effort now at 7:20-7:40/mile pace and suddenly start hitting personal best marks in a race because I notice that, based on where they were, they couldn’t USE the strength that higher mileage had given them in a race. Just like with teaching, how fast we teach students has no bearing on how quickly they learn. The body, too, takes time to adapt and absorb training and work capacity. I don’t put all my athletes in an event group in one mileage category. Where their heart is in training matters. A typical rule of thumb is that a long run should be about 20% of your weekly volume. I’ve had athletes who absolutely loved the long run as their favorite part of the week, loved exploring trails, or they wanted to do a half- marathon with a parent, or they wanted to do a marathon right after college—all of these factors affect those decisions. I think it’s important for athletes to keep whatever made them fall in love with the sport as an integral part of their training and get to include it sporadically across the season. With regard to strength training, we have a mix of neural-high-demand strength (multi-jumps, plyometrics, speed and power followed by absolute strength of high weight, low or medium reps followed by physical therapy injury-minimization correctives or movement pattern work and mobility) and circuit-style, low weight, high-repetition body- building regional lifts, and then extremely explosive medicine ball work as well. The strength work is tailored to the event they’re training for, and each athlete does a strength and movement assessment upon coming into the program, and their training design addresses their own deficiencies in movement patterns. We follow a load-load-load-explode pattern, which means that during a “down” mileage/volume week for them running wise, we coordinate the strength program to also allow them to “explode” in the weight room and test their ability to move the bar quickly comparative to their body weight and they use “tendo” units to test this and are given marks by the strength coach to hit based upon their individual needs. Their strength training partners with their run training which means recovery days are just that, recovery. We might do some medicine ball core or some general body strength that day, but that’s about it. Hard days are hard—they’ll have a workout in the morning and then come back at 2:30pm for strength in the weight room. That way their brains are getting consistent messaging on what adaptation the body ought to make within the same 24-hour period. With regard to strength, we really focus on the efficiency of movement patterns and form. Our strength coach (Heather Farmer) has a background as an NCAA soccer player, comes out to watch them run often, and understands their movement patterns, but more importantly, she understands their personalities and their communication needs. She is sassy and fun with them when needed, but also drives accountability and discipline when mandatory as well. She can read their energy and knows what they need or what level of sarcasm they can handle on any given day—her executive communication and ability to deliver honesty and feedback in a way that is received well because they have a strong foundation of respect with her already is her primary leadership strength. She and I get along very well, and I’m strength certified as well, so it helps that we can speak a common language as we communicate about how the athletes’ workouts went in the morning so that she can adapt anything she needs to for their afternoon strength session. If I tell her, hey, we raced on Saturday, so and so still looks tired on Monday, they were up all night Sunday finishing homework, etc, so I pulled them from the original session and had them fartlek on effort, or hey they are exhausted, can we adapt, she’s great about that and knows how to adjust so that they leave that session feeling more confident and energized than when they went in. Your strength routine and goals in there should match up and align with what you’re trying to do on the track or on the cross country course or else your brain gets confused. We are a program that implements speed year-round versus just sprinkling it in at the end of a periodization, even if that speed is in the form of power sleds, explosive med ball work, plyometrics, or hills during an early-season phase. Lastly, what are your personal goals and teams’ goals for the next five years? Our track and field team finished first at Mountain West Conference championships in 2020 and 2018 indoors. In 2020, I advanced four of my 800m athletes from the prelims to the finals at indoor conference championships, and my 800m athletes went 1-2 in that final. Our DMR took 6th. Next indoor I want to advance more than four 800m athletes from the prelim to the final, and for more than three of them to score, as I know they can. I want to put an athlete on the podium in every distant event in the Mountain West Conference, and produce more Olympic Trials qualifiers, more USA junior qualifiers, more regional and national qualifiers than past years in a wider range of events, and break a lot of school records. The cross country team has finished last or second to last in recent years. I improved the team a few places last year, and our goal includes to continue improving each year in our conference standings at cross country, especially as the roster depth has grown to include 1500m-10k specialists in addition to 400/800 specialists, and especially as they’ve bought into the vision with pack-running and my upper classmen juniors this year really ran like upper classmen and I was so proud to see that. I have individual goals for each athlete that I coach and a short-term as well as long-term plan for each that is flexible despite that the long-term goal does not change. We want the world to recognize that Las Vegas is a prime training ground and culture for distance running and there’s no better way to prove that than with success metrics and by showing up on the day. I have a very hungry team and group that is into the sport. That matters a lot and I can’t wait for them to feed off each other’s energy in-person this fall.
Interview with Alex Hutchinson – Author of “Endure” January 18, 2021 0 1 One of my favorite books of 2018, was Alex Hutchinson’s “Endure: Mind, Body and Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance.” Alex holds a Ph.D. in Physics from Cambridge and was a pretty quick runner in his day, with a PR of 3:42 in the 1500m and two appearances at the 1500m final at the Canadian Olympic Trials. He was gracious to answer some running questions from the Colorado Coyotes. You can follow Alex on Twitter and his articles on Oustide Online. First, I’m curious if you follow youth running at all? We’re currently seeing Katelyn Tuohy running some fantastic times and before that Mary Cain was the next up and coming American prodigy. What are your thoughts on youths who excel at an early age and if that results in success as an adult? I live in Canada, so I’m more tuned in to the performances here, but I also get caught up in the excitement around people like Cain and Tuohy. That said, I think it’s important to think carefully about how we define “success.” Youth sport is fun and valuable for its own sake, and can help establish lifelong patterns of healthy activity. It’s a lot less clear that winning races as a pre-teen or early teen will translate into winning races as an adult—but to me, that’s not really the main point of youth sport. We work with runners from the ages of 6-14, one area that fascinates me the most is just how competitive a young child is at an early age. We obviously see the spectrum, and I’m always left wondering if it’s genetics, parenting, environment or just a combination. Whenever I think it’s one or the other, I run into a contradiction, be it a parent who is a competitive athlete and their kids aren’t or a sibling, where one is competitive, and the other one isn’t at all. What are your thoughts and how much do you think we can move the needle on competitiveness? Ask me again in a decade! My kids are 5 and 2 right now, and my wife and I were both very serious competitive athletes well into adulthood. Running is how we met and continues to play a big role in our lives, so we’re very curious about how that will play out in our kids. When our five-year-old daughter wants to race up and down the street (and can’t stand losing), how much of that is that she got our genes, versus her learning from our behaviors or trying to intuit what we value? I don’t know the answer—though it’s also worth noting that both my wife and I have siblings who weren’t as interested in competitive sports. Ultimately, as with most questions like this, I figure the answer must be a mix of both. But I definitely think a lot about how (and if) we can help instill a healthy sense of competitiveness in my kids. Some good advice I heard from Jesse Itzler on this was: praise the effort. I think that’s a pretty good rule to keep in mind, because what matters most to me isn’t whether my kids win or lose, but that they learn to try their best. On that same note, to become a good runner, you must be comfortable with suffering and in some ways, enjoy pain. How do elite runners differ from the rest of us when it comes to suffering and how can we learn to embrace suffering? I think the most important thing to remember is that we all get better at handing pain with repeated exposure. It’s a skill like any other skill, and it gets better with practice. And the other thing to remember is that it never becomes easy. Pushing yourself in a race will always hurt—you just run faster. That was I something I always had to relearn at the beginning of each season: after months of training, I’d always be shocked at how much the first race of the year hurt. But after a few races, you get back in the groove. You’re often talking about strengthening your ankles to run faster and prevent fatigue. First, what are your thoughts on footwear for youth runners, should they be running in more minimalist footwear from an early age to build stronger feet? Lastly, we do almost all of our cross country workouts on the grass and uneven terrain, I’m hoping that too is beneficial for young runners? This is a tricky one. I’m not sure there’s a single answer that applies to everyone. I run in fairly “traditional” cushioned running shoes, because that’s what I’m used to, but I’ve tried to keep my kids in lighter, more flexible shoes for the most part. We’ll see how that goes if and when they start running—the ultimate rule is to find what works for each kid. I do agree that grass and (moderately) uneven terrain is a great way to strengthen feet and ankles, and also to avoid injuries from repetitive motion. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen you touch on youth sports specialization. The good thing is young runners are less likely to specialize compared to other sports, but I also know middle schoolers who compete year-round in running, is this a method of success long term? I’m not an expert on talent development, but my impression is that the research tends to show that athletes who reach elite levels as adults are less likely to have specialized before the age of about 16. We also need to think more broadly about what’s good for the kids rather than our particular sport. Sampling lots of different sports makes it more likely that a kid will end up in the sport he or she is best suited to and enjoys most. That’s a far better recipe for long-term success than doing some extra off-season training as a 12-year-old. Personally I played on the basketball team all through high school and also played a year each of baseball and tennis in addition to running. I think that served me well both as an athlete and as a person. I found your chapter on “Heat” especially fascinating. In Colorado, high school runners typically have their first cross country meet in August, after school, where the sun can be blasting upon them and temperatures hovering around 90 degrees. If they’ve been training at all over the summer, they’ve been running in the morning when temperatures are cooler. What’s your advice on how to handle those hot early season cross country races? Is it a mistake for high school runners to not train in conditions which they are likely to race in, early in the season? Wow, that’s hot racing weather! The good news is that, after the summer, most of us are fairly well acclimated to hot weather, even if we haven’t been racing in it. The risks are bigger on the first warm days after a long, cold winter. But racing in 90-degree is going to be severely challenging no matter how well prepared you are. Doing some training sessions in those conditions will probably help, but you also have to accept that you’ll be slower than you’d otherwise be. And you have to decide how important these early-season meets are: do you want to compromise their training by doing it in super-hot weather in order to perform better in August meets, or are there bigger goals later in the season that you want to focus on? You’ve looked at the “metabolic window of opportunity” with regards to training. What advice do you have for young runners in terms of fueling after practice or post race? The most important advice is to eat a healthy diet throughout the day, not just before and after practice. That means lots of fruits and vegetables, a decent amount of protein, and ideally not too much processed and fast foods. They don’t need to be downing Gatorade or protein bars after workouts. That said, if they’re doing a workout and then don’t have a meal planned for a few hours, it is important to ensure they have some food with them—heck, a tuna sandwich will do—refuel. What are your thoughts on vitamins and supplements with regards to athletes? I honestly feel like I can’t decipher the data anymore and the various reports. Would you recommend multi-vitamins, fish oil, etc. for high school/collegiate runners and if so, which ones? Personally, I take vitamin D during the winter, and that’s it. You could make a case for fish oil, but I’m not convinced it’s helpful. I don’t think multivitamins are useful—unless you’re not eating a good diet with lots of fruit and vegetables, in which case a multivitamin isn’t going to fix all your problems. When it comes to runners lifting weights are there any specific lifts that you feel provide the most significant ROI? Also, most cross country programs have runners lifting immediately after practice, however, is this the best time for a young runner to lift? To be totally honest, this is an area where I don’t have a solid answer. I think some general full-body strengthening is a good idea, but I’m not sure which specific exercises are most important, or if there are big differences between weights programs. Lifting after practice is reasonable, though it’s not the only possible approach. It’s definitely better than lifting immediately before practice, which would compromise your training. I think the most important factor to consider with workout scheduling is logistics: what’s most convenient for the kids? Making them get up an hour early to lift before school might make sense physiologically, but totally backfire because it’s robbing them of sleep. Lastly, what advice do you have for parents and coaches of young runners to help them succeed in high school and beyond? Enjoy the present moment rather than focusing on whether you’re going to earn a scholarship or go to the Olympics. Enjoy the process rather than judging the success or failure of your year by how you place in an important race. Enjoy working with your coach and teammates and sharing the highs and lows of competition, because the team element of running is the part that’s hardest to sustain as an adult. And work hard, because running is probably the area of your life with the closest correlation between what you put in and what you get out!
Interview with tabor scholl January 18, 2021 0 0 Tabor, thanks for taking the time out of what I’m sure is a busy schedule for an interview with the Colorado Coyotes. I was thinking we could start with the past and work our way to the present. I think the first time I saw you and your family race was at the 2010 Denver Mother’s Day 5K. You were 13 years old, in the 8th grade and ran an 18:54 5K! Tell us about those middle school years and what were you doing in terms of training? Oh no thank you Simon, I feel very privileged and blessed to have the opportunity to share my story! Growing up in Kremmling, CO not many kids, or adults for that matter, did the sports that my parents introduced my brother and I to. In a school system that was dominated by the traditional sports (i.e. football, volleyball, basketball) running, Nordic skiing, CrossFit were sort of taboo activities that just my family and I did. My parents emphasized the importance of learning life-long sports and enjoying them. So from a young age I grew to love the painful, aerobic sports…it helped that I was pretty good at them too! In order to foster a positive environment around these sports (running in-particular), my training was rather haphazard and more about having fun. Training consisted of running on some days, doing lifting on some days, and then cycling or Nordic skiing on the other days. By switching training up at a young age, I never got bored or tired of doing any of them as I continued onto high school. Your freshman year (2011) of high school cross country was phenomenal. Looking at MileSplit, it appears you went undefeated the entire season, culminating in winning the 3A State Championships. Looking back on that year, what do you remember and what were your expectations for the rest of your high school career? I’d have to think that winning State four years in a row was a realistic goal? Freshman year was by far the most enjoyable of my high school career and I credit that to being completely naïve about my competitors and the world of high school running as a whole. I was enveloped in my own world of training up in God’s country and didn’t focus on my competitors; which I think really benefitted me when I got to the start line of races. Looking back on that first year, I believed myself to be the best and that no one was faster or fitter than me. This confidence translated to my races, where I typical led wire to wire, because I expected myself to win from beginning to end. My expectations for the rest of my high school career were to win all four titles in Cross Country and then set track records from the 400m-3200m. However, God had different plans in mind for me and He had to teach me a lesson or two on humility. Moving on to your sophomore year, it looks like you took a small step back with regards to over all times in cross country and still managed to finish second at the State meet. Your junior season saw similar times to your sophomore year, and an 11th place finish at the Colorado State Meet. Lastly, your senior year saw you get back to form, run a PR at Desert Twilight in 17:50 and you won your second Colorado State Championship, once as a freshman and another as a senior. Tell us about those high school years, I’m guessing you dealt with a lot of frustrations, and it’s awe-inspiring how you bounced back your senior year? The rest of my high school career was VERY challenging and I had to really lean in on God to find my purpose in life. I had to go hang out in the valleys of running to truly be appreciative of being on the mountain tops of the sport. I had to decide for myself if I loved the sport and that I wasn’t just doing it to please my parents. Additionally, I had to learn how to run and train in a new body from freshman year to senior year, and that was a big component to my dip in running success for a while (definitely not uncommon for girls). Being taller, having longer legs, and being a little heavier because of the growth factored into my running form. It took time to find my stride again, both physically and metaphorically, but finally by senior year I got it down. There were a lot of hard moments in high school, but I’m super thankful for those times because it challenged me to grow, explore, and come to realize that running is a part of my life but doesn’t define my life. That my happiness/contempt on a day to day basis shouldn’t rest on my running performance. Looking back on your middle school and high school years, you raced a lot, did you ever think it was too much? How hard was it to stay motivated during those times? Is there anything you would personally do different or advice you’d give for talented female runners in middle school? Really, you think we raced a lot? Just kidding, I did race A LOT! I never thought it was too much, because my parents had created a fun atmosphere around racing. Growing up, the way we explored the state of Colorado (and even the nation) was through our racing. We’d train during the week, then go to a race on the weekends and make it a vacation. Doing that allowed for racing to seem like a treat, because we got to go to new places, meet like-minded people who were into running, go to cool coffee shops, etc. It was way easier to go do a race than train because we were able to do it with people and it helped that we did pretty good at them. However, as I exited middle school and transitioned to high school racing, I started putting too much emphasis on racing. I’d get so extremely nervous for a low-key JV meet that I was just running for training. If I was giving advice to my younger self, I’d tell me that it doesn’t matter and no one cares as much as you do. Looking back, I wish that I would have not worked by self-up into such a nervous nelly, but instead enjoyed the fact that I was able to run and put on a performance for those (few as they usually were) in the stands. Ok, you’re back in high school, what made you decide to run at the University of Colorado? Your freshman year of college you ended up dropping out and returning back home for a while and then later returned to CU and began your first xc season in 2016 is that right? Can you tell me about that year and what youlearned/discovered about yourself? What made me decide to run at University of Colorado was Heather Burroughs and Mark Wetmore. On my visit I connected with their philosophy, their demand for excellence from their athletes, their commitment to the team, the list of athletes they’ve developed, and the much more. It also didn’t hurt that I’d only be about 2 ½ Hours away from my family in Kremmling. So my story involving my initial start at CU is incredibly long and complicated, but I’ll do my best to give you a shortened version. In the fall of my freshman year, I had to defer my enrollment due to a complication with the NCAA clearinghouse with the plan to start at the beginning of the spring semester (this actually happens rather frequently throughout the NCAA in various sports). Come January, I was enrolled, practicing, and competing at CU; however, I had some serious growing up to do. Honestly I couldn’t handle being away from home and was so incredibly homesick that it was debilitating. Because of this I got all my affairs in order to drop out, walked up to the Mark and Heather’s offices, and proceeded to tell them that I was quitting and going back home. This was, and still is, the hardest conversation I’ve ever had in my life. I did this all without my parents blessing and to put it lightly they were VERY unhappy. I then proceeded to move back home with the plan of working and continue training for running. In the spring, I raced a few big meets with lack luster results and was really feeling lost in life. Come the middle of the summer, my parents said that when the Fall rolled around I needed to do something with my life and that I wasn’t allowed to live at home forever. This created a lot of angst and I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. Not long after that conversation with my parents, I was given the opportunity to begin again at CU and run under Mark and Heather. I knew that a second chance like this doesn’t happen very often, so I stepped out in fear and faith deciding to go back…the rest is history. During this time I learned a great deal about myself! I learned that I needed to grow up, develop relationships aside from those within my family, and that I needed to give myself the opportunity to become a great runner so that I didn’t have any regrets later in life. During the cross country season, what’s a typical day look like for you, from the time you get up to when you go to bed with regards to school work and training? Coach Mark Wetmore is arguably one of the greatest cross country coaches ever, yet so many promising Colorado high school runners choose to go elsewhere, why do you think that is? Also, what’s it like running for Coach Wetmore? A typical day in the cross country season looks like this: 6:00-6:30 a.m- wake up and drink copious amounts of coffee 7:00 a.m- Do my daily Bible study 7:30-8:00 a.m ish- eat breakfast, which is usually some combo of eggs, toast, peanut butter 9:00 a.m.-1:00 p.m.- typically I have class. I am a communication major and religious studies minor, so I have a very interesting assortment of classes. I typically eat lunch in class and drink some more coffee for liquid motivation prior to practice. 1:30 p.m. ish- I do some pre-run activation drills, roll out, and prepare for the run of the day. 2:00 p.m.- As a team, we always meet at 2:00 p.m. and practice varies everyday (easy, hard, long, fast) but always includes running of some sort. 5:30 p.m.- Cook dinner. I love to cook and it’s how I express my artistic side. I LOVE red meat, so a typical dinner consists of a steak, toast with avocado, and some roasted brussel sprouts. 6:00 p.m.- Start homework and try to do it uninterrupted until 8pm 8:00 p.m.- If I have time, I’ll watch a Netflix show to wind down from the day 8:30 p.m.- Bed time! I aim to always get between 9 ½ to 10 hours of sleep a night. I think Colorado high school runners go somewhere else because they want to distance themselves from the Colorado running bubble. I think they want to spread their wings and be exposed to what other states have to offer. Honestly, I don’t understand this because I think we are so spoiled here in Colorado (especially Boulder) with the weather, training venues, and great coaches like mine! Wow, that’s a big question! Um, what is it like to run for Mark…It requires self-motivation, autonomy, and self-discipline. Mark and Heather are a great coaching duo and they put a great deal of effort into purposely designing our training plans; however, it is up to the athlete to do the hard work. There is no hand holding or sugar coating, which I really appreciate. They treat us like adults and aren’t there to be our parents. A demand for excellence is present and this (at least for me) makes me want to show up, work hard, and race well not only for myself but also for my coaches. I feel very blessed to be able to be coached by Mark and Heather. This past fall the CU women won the national championship in Madison, Wisconsin with snow on the course and a chill in the air. You finished third for the Buffs and a surprising 15th overall, earning All-American Status. If that wasn’t the highlight ofyour running career, it has to be up there? Tell us about that day? Definitely a highlight! That day was really magical and to be able to share that with my teammates was incredible. Finishing 15thmade me believe that I belong up with the best in the NCAA and gave me a deeper confidence that a great runner is slowly developing within me. That day was filled with the evidence of how much training we put in as a team in non-ideal conditions. The course was covered with snow and lent itself to the tough runners…we train in all conditions because our coaches don’t want us getting soft haha, so having that component on race day really helped us out. On that day, each woman on our team had the best race of their xc career and that aided to our collective success. Afterwards, there was a lot of embracing, tears, and moments that will be engraved in my heart forever. In sports, I think people often feel that success is linear, you just keep improving a little bit each year. Your running career is a testament that success can often be a winding path. I get the impression that your grit is off the charts, I know you’ve dealt with a lot of injuries over career, what keeps you going? What keeps me going can best described by this quote I have on my fridge “When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could day, ‘I used everything you gave me.’” Lastly, what are your goals going forward and in particular post-college? Going forward I hope to be able to continue to develop as runner, stay healthy, and prove that I’m one of the best runners in the NCAA. The big dream/goal is to be able to pursue running post-collegiate, securing a professional contract, and get to make running my fulltime job. I’m hoping that works out because I don’t think I’m ready to go into the 9-5 workforce yet haha Thank you so much Simon for interviewing me. I really appreciate you giving me the platform and opportunity to share my story!
Interview with Elizabeth DeBole – Stanford Women’s XC Coach January 18, 2021 0 1 Elizabeth DeBole coaches Stanford’s women’s distance runners, and in her first two seasons as head women’s cross country coach she led the Cardinal to a pair of top-five NCAA finishes, including a podium-finish of fourth in 2017. DeBole, who has completed four academic years on staff, has collected two NCAA West Region Coach of the Year awards. She was Women’s Cross Country Coach of the Year in 2016 and Indoor Coach of the Year in 2017, the latter largely for her work with Elise Cranny and Vanessa Fraser, who combined to help Stanford to an NCAA runner-up finish in the distance medley relay. The Loudonville, New York, native was a two-time USTFCCCA All-Academic selection and earned Big East Conference Scholar-Athlete honors. She then became a volunteer assistant coach at Georgetown before coming to Stanford. She is married to Matt DeBole, also a former runner at Georgetown. They have a son, George. Bio taken from Stanford Track and Field website. It looks like you have had a long career at the top level of track and field, including a PR of 15:15.27 in the 5k and top 10 at five US Championships. What advice do you have for young runners wanting to achieve a similar level in their running career? Be patient and have fun! I always ran my best when I was truly enjoying it – but that doesn’t mean it’s easy! Running is really, really hard so you better enjoy doing it! Patience is key in that it takes a lot of hard work to improve, and many times you don’t see the hard work pay off right away. You need to have a telescope AND a microscope: a telescope to keep your eye on your big goals and a microscope to help you get a little bit better every day. If you’re patient, you’ll be presented with opportunities to take advantage of and run fast! What do you think parents and athletes should look for in a running program? Look for programs where you feel like you fit in and can easily talk with the coach. Training is a piece of the puzzle but truly believing and trusting in the coach and his or her process is far and away the most important thing. And in order to be successful, you need to have open communication. If you aren’t comfortable talking with the coach about uncomfortable topics, it’s going to be really hard to improve! We are always exploring ways to keep to keep our athletes healthy and mitigate injury. Do you have any exercises you use for your athletes to avoid injury? We don’t have any specific exercises, but I go back to the importance of communication! For us, we don’t run a lot of mileage or do super hard workouts – we really focus on consistency over time. So when we write a workout, we need to be sure we’re talking with our athletes each day to be sure we are staying in the correct energy zone AND recovering afterward. When you stop fully recovering from workouts, you enter into potential injury territory!! Running easy, sleep, and building in time to have fun is so important! From the perspective of a collegiate athlete, how did you balance academics and athletics? It’s all about time management! We sit down with all of our freshmen and talk about what their goals are on the track and the process for how to get there. It is also very helpful for me to get on the same page with what the athletes want to accomplish. Then we come up with a roadmap of how to get there: how they are going to prioritize academics and training…and what they are going to say no to. There are only so many hours in each day and with having such big goals, many times that means they can’t do all of the extracurricular activities they want. It’s good practice for life after running! We can’t do everything! So choose what you really want to do and be really good at it! What led to your decision to coach? I love helping my athletes grow. It’s hard when to see your athletes struggle (which is unavoidable in track and field!) but watching the succeed on the other side is the absolute best. I had great coaches throughout my career – from high school to college and beyond – and they impacted my life in such a positive way. I wanted to be able to have that same impact on others! What have you enjoyed about XC as both an athlete and a coach? Cross country is so much fun because it’s truly a team effort – you are fighting for every single spot because you know it matters for your teammates. You’re racing for something bigger than yourself. That was the best part of cross country as an athlete and it’s really carried over into coaching, too! This past weekend was the Indoor National Championship. Elise Cranny was part of the 2nd place Distance Medley Relay (DMR) team and 5th place in the women’s mile. Elise was one of the top recruits in the country coming out of Colorado and has continued to improve and excel through her senior year at Stanford. This is not always the story for top high school recruits. What do you credit to her success throughout her collegiate career? Elise is awesome. She’s definitely had her ups and downs, that’s just part of the sport. But I think her ability to stay positive and put things in perspective in times of hardship has been the key to her success. Elise really worked on that skill, it didn’t come easily! After the success she had her freshman year, she went through a tough year struggling with injury. But I really give her credit for working on herself and being a really, really, really good teammate — and honestly I think that helped her succeed individually! Even this past weekend, she wanted more than anything to be on that DMR — even though she had the mile finals the next day. We talked about how racing on the relay (she had to run FAST, too!) could potentially impact her next day when the other competitors were coming in fresh. But she wouldn’t trade that relay experience for anything, and she still fought her way to 5th in the mile and ran a Stanford meet record, too!
Interview with Coach Kevin Jermyn – Elon University January 18, 2021 0 0 Kevin Jermyn is the head cross country coach and assistant track and field coach at Elon University in North Carolina. He has been coaching for almost 20 years with 14 seasons at Duke University as head women’s cross country coach and associate track and field coach from 2000 to 2014. Some of his accolades include ACC Coach of the Year and NCAA Southeast Region Coach of the Year. He also helped the Blue Devils to a second and third place finish at the NCAA Championships in 2004 and 2005. As a college XC and track coach, what general thoughts do you have about youth running programs? Do you encourage kids to participate in multiple sports or focus on one? From a health and a long-term running development perspective, I believe it is valuable to participate in a variety of sports/activities. However, if a young runners doesn’t participate in other sports/activities, they can also develop their overall athleticism by participating in the field events, sprints and hurdles. Your running resume is top notch. Millrose Games high school mile champion in HS, All-American at Georgetown, and a professional career with a best of 3:43.56 in the 1500m. When did you start running seriously and who/what helped you reach that top level? I began running in the summer prior to my freshman year of high school. My sister, who was two years older, was on our high school’s cross country and track & field team. I decided to follow her lead and had a feeling that I had pretty good endurance. I was never the fastest kid in my neighborhood, but I seemed to be able to outlast many of my friends while playing. I was blessed with two amazing coaches at my high school, Peter Whitehouse and Joe Cicoria. They instilled a culture at our high school where team members worked diligently in their studies and athletics. They helped me become educated about running and challenged me to push myself to be my best. In college, I also benefited from world-class coach, Frank Gagliano, and from training with some of the best runners in the world. While I may have had some talent for running, I believe that most of the success came from a strong work ethic, the will to win and a love for what I was doing. Injury has been an issue for you as an athlete and for many of the athletes, you have coached over the years. Do you have some recommendations on exercises or drills kids can perform to avoid injury? I focus on three key areas when advising my runners on how to become injury resistant. First, you need to eat healthy, which means both a sufficient volume of food and high-quality ingredients. If you owned a Ferrari, I am sure you would only put the finest gas and oil into that high powered engine. Why do we treat ourselves any different? Second, you need to get to sleep early and log nine hours of sleep to support higher level training. Runners that are training seriously and sleep less than eight hours are more injury prone. Third, you need to build a strong core and feet so that you can maintain proper posture while running. Specifically, I focus on exercises that strengthen the transverse abdominals, glute medius and our big toe. Many runners already focus on their core quite a bit, but I have seen good results by focusing on foot health as well. Our feet are our first point of contact, so if we lose alignment/posture there, it will throw alignment off going up the kinetic chain. We have some kids that will be heading to high school in the next few years. What recommendations do you have for them to prepare for the transition to high school XC and track? I believe that success in running, more than many sports, is more influenced by your work ethic and lifestyle. If you want to become a successful high school runner, keep on progressing your training volume and intensity, and couple that with lots of sleep and excellent nutrition. If you are not satisfied with where your performances are, be patient, put in the work and trust the process. You will get there! When recruiting athletes to your program, what qualities are you looking for? Love for running and hard work. Team focused. Posture/athleticism. You’ve been coaching for almost twenty years now. What made you decide to start coaching and what do you enjoy most about it? I love our sport and teaching. My coaches had a profound positive impact on my life and I find great fulfillment on trying to pay it forward so to speak.
Deliberate Practice & Youth Cross Country January 18, 2021 0 2 Allen Iverson once said, “We talkin’ about practice, not a game, not a game, we talkin’ about practice.” Growing up, I thought practice was practice. If you wanted to get better at something you simply practiced more and that hard work would pay off. In my youth, I loved playing basketball and running. Most of my training was self-guided and looking back, I didn’t practice effectively. Daniel Coyle’s “The Talent Code” is one of my all-time favorite books and the concept of deep practice and deliberate practice was also touched upon in Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers” and Angela Duckworth’s “Grit.” I’ve read all three and highly recommend them, especially to parents, teachers, and coaches. K. Anders Ericsson is one of the pioneers in researching deliberate practice. You’ve probably heard of the “10,000-hour rule” which was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell. Well, Malcom was writing about research that Ericsson had done on violinists looking at their practice hours and skill level. That “rule” and its efficacy was quickly dismissed, but if the point was that the more you practiced the better you got, well that’s true, but how you practice is also important. A simple definition of deliberate practice would be that it’s not how many hours you practice, but how you practice, not all practice is equal. The old saying was “practice makes perfect” but that has been replaced with “practice makes permanent.” Ericsson put his ideas to paper with last year’s book “Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise.” The difference between deliberate practice and ordinary practice are in the areas of goals, feedback, focus, and practicing at the edge of your abilities. I have to admit that most of my application of deliberate practice is when I look at other sports. For the most part, running is a simple sport and not as complicated as mastering your golf game or playing a team sport like basketball or soccer with a lot of moving parts. We launched the Colorado Coyotes in the fall of 2016, as someone who times races for a living, I’m pretty locked in on the importance of time and reading out timing splits during workouts. However, when I read “Peak” last year, I thought about deliberate practice and youth running. How do you create an atmosphere of deliberate practice in a cross-country setting? Following our first cross country meet of the year, the kids were lining up on the grass for a workout. I thought about times and deliberate practice and started quizzing the kids and asking them if they knew their time from the race on Sunday. I was taken aback that only 50% of the kids had any idea what their time was from a race they ran a day prior. It was also obvious that the kids who were new to running had not developed any heuristics that would allow them to ballpark a time. For all, they knew they could have run the 3-kilometer course in 10 minutes or 20 minutes. One thing we stress as coaches is that running is a unique sport in that you can only have one individual winner and for most kids they will never win a race, that’s ok, the real goal is self-improvement and as coaches we weren’t doing our job in that regards, in running, the best way to see self-improvement is the clock. After that practice, I realized that a lot of my split reading probably fell on deaf ears, so how do I get the kids into that deliberate practice sweet spot where they are not only focusing but focusing on running faster. My first step was to better explain why I was reading off splits, if we were running 8*400 meter intervals, I wanted them to focus on their times, either via their watch or to listen to one of the coaches as we read off times. Each workout would need to be explained with a time-related goal. For that workout the objective was that their first 400m was to be their slowest and that I wanted their fastest one to be on their last one and at any time during the workout, I would call out a few kids and ask them what their fastest 400m was of the day. Once the parameters were set the kids started paying attention to their times and when I’d quiz them they could tell me their fastest 400 in the set. On the final 400, the kids would finish and I’d ask the group “Put up your hand if your fastest 400 was your last one” and in general we’d have 95% compliance as the season progressed. We felt good about making a more productive practice, but what about the meets, the importance of knowing your times as a runner is to track progress and in youth cross country we generally have one or two races that are run on the same course, which allows us to compare apples to apples. We stressed the importance of knowing your time and reminded the kids that we send the link of race results to the parents as soon as they are available. Our second step was that we created an Excel spreadsheet with all of the kids on our teams and their race times, we not only email the individual race results but an Excel spreadsheet with all of the Coyotes and the times of every race that they have run that year. We’ve also built a culture emphasizing that times and self-improvement are important, both the times you run in practice and the times you run in races. If we ask a Coyote what time they ran in the meet the prior weekend and they don’t know, we tell them how they can find that information and that we will follow up and ask them at a subsequent practice. When a young runner focuses on times and splits, concentrating on not running the first interval too fast and working on incremental improvement that’s when they enter the sweet spot that is known as deliberate practice. What we want to avoid is the young runner zoning out on a workout and simply running to complete the workout with no purpose. When our young runners are focusing on splits and times, they are cognizant as to how their body feels at a certain pace and when they concentrate on running their last interval the fastest, that ties back to knowing you can run your fastest at the end of the race, when you’re already tired and the body hurts. The goal is work at the edge of one’s abilities. At the end of our 2017 fall cross country season, we took the kids down to the track and had them run a 1600 meter time trial, with the timing clock in full display, ticking off the seconds. At this point in the season, I was aware of what the kids could run and started giving a few of our older runners a time goal. That escalated into every Coyote wanting a time goal, which we were happy to provide. The goal was tough, at the edge of their abilities, but attainable. Almost every runner, on that chilly November evening, surpassed their time goal and made sure to tell me that they ran faster than the time I gave them. All we could do was smile, deliberate practice.
Interview with Coach Sara Slattery – Grand Canyon University January 18, 2021 0 1 Sara (Gorton) Slattery is one of all the time running greats to come out of the University of Colorado, a 10-time All-American and a two-time NCAA champion. She is the last American woman to have won the BolderBoulder, back in 2006 and was elected to the CU Hall of Fame in 2016. In 2015, Grand Canyon University hired Sara as the head coach of the men’s and women’s cross country program as they made the jump to Division 1. She’s married to Steve Slattery, a former All-American at the University of Colorado. I like to start with the hard-hitting questions first. I’m a huge basketball fan and loved Dan Majerle growing up. When Grand Canyon University (GCU) signed Thunder Dan as their head basketball coach and moved to Division 1, it was a big get. Just curious if you have gotten the chance to meet Dan? Ha! I was a huge fan of the Phoenix Suns in the 90’s with Thunder Dan. He is a huge name in Phoenix and was a huge hire for GCU and he has really brought a lot to the basketball program as well as attention to the University. I have gotten to know Dan. He is a really great guy and our offices used to be right next to each other. He would always find time to say hello to my kids and shoot around with my son Stevie. Interesting fact about Dan is that he has a 4:30 Mile PR from college. Which is very impressive for a 6’6” 230lb guy. Grand Canyon University is a for-profit Christian university and the only for-profit institution at the Division 1 level, does that create any hurdles when recruiting athletes to GCU? Is the religious aspect of the school a factor for kids who ultimately decide to run for GCU? It definitely makes our school unique in how our school is run. But it is just for tax purposes but if you are on campus you wouldn’t’ see any differences in how we are run compared to a nonprofit university. Being for profit has not been a hurdle for recruiting. About half the recruits know we are for profit and the ones that do know it doesn’t seem to matter in their decision making. Our biggest hurdle is that we are a new University and not a lot of people know who we are and what we are trying to do. We have several athletes initially interested in the religious aspects of the school and it is a big selling point in coming to GCU. With the school being located in Phoenix, how do you manage running in the heat, are all the practices early in the morning and do you have to move workouts indoors when it gets really hot? Heat is a factor in Phoenix but really only for about a month at the beginning of the school year (August/September) and the last month of the year (May). From October to April, I’ll argue we have the best running weather in the country. Not many places in the US can you run in t-shirt and short in January. In the first month of school we will practice early in the morning and as it gets cooler we will push practice back. We never move practice indoors. In the mornings the temperature will be 30degrees cooler. We train in the morning in the fall and the afternoons in the spring. Training in the heat makes you tougher. Having run and worked with Coach Wetmore, what did you take away from him in terms of coaching style and what do you do differently? I was very lucky to work with such an amazing college coach and I truly believe a lot of my success in college came from his coaching and guidance. In terms of coaching style, Coach Wetmore is always calm. I don’t remember ever hearing him raise his voice or get flustered or stressed in any situation. No matter if you are at the Olympic Trials or a rust buster on our home track he would have a plan, and made you feel confident and calm about the plan. He was also very truthful. He didn’t sugar coat things. I try to also be calm with my athletes. However, unlike Wetmore who in races usually finds a distant corner on the track or race course to watch his athlete’s race and tell them cues, I tend to be a little more vocal and get a bit more excited and like to yell for them. Let’s talk parenting, you and Steve have two young children, it’s probably a safe assumption that they have the genetics to be great runners. Have you guys thought about how you’ll approach running with your children and has Steve already built a steeple water jump in the backyard? Ha! That’s funny. No, we haven’t built a steeple in our backyard yet. Yes, our kids have genes of two high level running parents. However, we don’t really want to push running on our kids. We want Stevie and Cali to try a lot of different activities and find what they enjoy doing. We don’t want them to specialize in anything until they are in high school. They both have a lot of energy so I am guessing it will be some sort high energy activity or sport (at least I hope so they aren’t bouncing off the walls at home). I don’t care if they are a soccer player or in the orchestra I just want them to find something they enjoy doing and to work hard to get better. Sticking with youth development, you and Steve were elite runners going back to your high school days. Knowing what you know now, what things would you have done differently and/or what advice would you give to young kids who have elite talent at an early age? I would say make it fun. Surround yourself with teammates and coaches that support you, push you but make your running enjoyable. If you enjoy what you are doing the hard work and many miles you put in won’t be work, you will look forward to it. What type of strength work and injury prevention work is being done at GCU? How often are runners hitting the weights and can you tell us what type of lifting they do? We do quite a bit of injury prevention and strength work. We do prehab glute activation and dynamic flexibility exercises before every run. 4 Days a week we do general strength and core exercises after runs and twice a week we are in the weight room lifting. Our lifting is not complicated. We do some Olympic lifts as well as general exercises. Everything is working on getting our athletes stronger to handle the demands of distance running, work on posture and creat power. You are one of the few female head coaches at the Division 1 level. How do we encourage more women to get into coaching and why do you think so few women are willing to make that jump? The last few years there has been a big change in sports. I think the tides are changing and there are quite a few more women in coaching. In the past, it was a predominately male field. I spoke on the Women in coaching panel at our USTFCCA Coaches Convention this year. At the NCAA’s in cross country, it set a record for the largest number programs with women’s coaches. More and more programs are hiring women. I think women are hesitant to make the jump into coaching because of the time and travel requirements and family obligations. Coaches are on the road almost every other weekend from September to June. Women are more often in charge of taking care of the family and they aren’t sure if they want to be away from their family that often. I am very lucky because I have a very supportive Head Coach, Tom Flood, and Administration. Outside of practice, I work in the office two days a week and I work from home the other days. I spend most nights working till 11 pm so I can spend the days with my kids. Looking at last season’s schedule, GCU had raced in Flagstaff, Tucson, Louisville, Mesa, Santa Clara, Las Cruces and Seattle. Tell us about traveling and which meets are you flying to, are you taking the entire team and how do the runners balance the travel with missing class time? We fly to most races out of state. The only meet we didn’t during XC season was Las Cruces because it was only a 5-hour bus ride. The in-state meets(NAU, UofA, and Mesa) we are able to take the full team to. For the out of state meets we typically take 7-9 Men and 7-9 Women. We travel athletes based on how they are performing and try to take the best 7-9 individuals to those races and prepare them for our championship races (Conference, Regionals, and Nationals). We are typically gone for two days and our athletes are very good at balancing their race travel with school work. Our academic team alerts professors when we are traveling. If an athlete misses a test we can proctor the tests or they can reschedule it before or after they return from our trip. As a student-athlete, you learn quickly how to manage your time well and plan ahead. Where are you at personally with your own running? Are you still training at a high level and do you have any personal running goals for the future? The first year I started coaching I trained for the Olympic Trials Marathon and ran the A standard (32:13) in the 10K on the track. The next fall I attempted my first marathon at CIM (I got strep throat and wasn’t able to finish the marathon). Since December 2016 I haven’t been training for a race. I still ran most days but wanted to take a break and put more time into my coaching. With the New Year, I really craved having a running goal again but wanted to have a goal I could balance with Coaching. My goal is to break 4:50 in the mile and be able to help pace my girls in workouts and races.
Interview with Coach Robert Parish – Battle Mountain High School January 18, 2021 0 0 One of the most amazing cross-country running stories of 2017, was the Battle Mountain Huskies (Edwards, Colo.) girls cross country team taking third at Nike Cross Nationals back on December 2nd, in Portland, Oregon. A small high school in the mountains, took third in the nation, competing against schools of all sizes. Coach Robert Parish is also the principal of Battle Mountain High School (BMHS). While at BMHS, they have won 19 regional titles in boys/girls xc and track, five state titles and have had one individual state champion. Thanks to Coach Parish for answering some questions from the Colorado Coyotes. Coach Parish, you grew up in Carson City, Nevada and ran at Montana State University. Tell us a little about yourself and were you a good runner back in your prime? Cue Springsteen’s “Glory Days”! I did run Track and X-C for Carson High School back in the day. I was fortunate enough to win three State Championships in the largest division (X-C, 2 mile, 4 x 800 Relay), and our top team finish was 2nd, by 2 points by Senior Year. I was a serviceable runner at Montana State, peaking as the team’s 5th runner a few seasons. Nothing too fancy there, but we did have a great time! The Battle Mountain girls cross country team, running as Vail Valley Running Club took third at Nike Cross Nationals back in December. A school with an enrollment of 940 is not only the top girl’s team in Colorado but the third best team in the entire country. That is truly amazing, tell us about your magical season and was making it to nationals even a goal to start the season? It was an amazing season in every sense. Coming off a strong season last year, and knowing that we were bringing back everyone for this season, we set our goal a year out of making Nike Nationals. We had many other goals along the way. We wanted to repeat as CO region champs (7 times in a row) and defend our 4A State Title. Another key season goal of ours was to enjoy every part of the journey. We wanted to enjoy the training process and races along the way. We knew that a race would take only 20 minutes of time, but we were going to invest much of our lives into the chase. We wanted to enjoy every step of the process. I think we achieved this goal as well. How do you manage training and specifically tapering when you have the 4A state championships on October 28th, the Nike Cross Southwest Regionals on November 17th and Nike Cross Nationals on December 2nd? Those are three huge meets you want your runners to be peaking at but over a fairly long time period? This was a challenge for sure. The initial plan was to basically train through our Colorado Regional meet and only do a slight pullback for the Colorado State meet. Unfortunately, our team was ravaged by a nasty cold about 10 days before Regionals. This forced us into pulling way back the week of Regionals, and then at State as well so the athletes could go into those races as healthy as possible. We knew it was a good sign when they ran decently well despite less than perfect health. I felt that they were starting to lose some fitness coming out of the state meet, so we ramped up big time for two weeks after the State meet. That was then followed by a “peak week” going into NXR SW. They hit it out of the park in Arizona, but qualifying for NXN then threw us into another situation where we hammered hard for a week, and pulled back for a week. Peaking 3 times in a 5-week time frame is not an ideal recipe for success, but our team accepted the reality and fully bought into the plan, as they always do. The result was the validation of commitment to the plan, which is also one of the keys to our success. At the start of the cross country season, how many kids did you have on the boys and girls team? I am assuming your participation numbers have grown along with the success you’ve had over the years? We typically have around 70 athletes on our team. We usually have some strong, fast runners, but it’s equally important to our team culture that we welcome and encourage athletes of all speeds, backgrounds, and abilities to our team. We have a wide mix of athletes on our team, and we celebrate and value every team member. We really try to promote the inclusivity of our group.We took great pride that our JV team went undefeated this past season as well. My experience with a lot of great high school programs is that they have a middle school program or a youth club program that helps get the kids ready for high school. Does Battle Mountain have anything like that or are the freshman coming in with little running experience? We do have middle school X-C programs at our two feeder schools. Most of our varsity team consists of athletes who found their love of running after the start of high school. However, most of our fastest and strongest upperclassmen usually come to us to run as their “2nd or 3rd sport”. We take and encourage all sorts of multi-sport athletes. Often times they start to catch fire and make running their number one sport. We’ve found that this style of allowing athletes to find their love of running might initially put them behind some of their counterparts, but usually has them hungry, eager and fresh for their later years in our program. As a male coach who coaches both the boys and girls program, can you discuss your coaching style and how it may differ when coaching and motivating different genders? I really enjoy coaching both the boys and the girls, and think it would be strange to only coach one group. There are many stylistic differences between coaching boys and girls, and both respond differently to different types of motivation. However, relationship building is still the cornerstone of coaching any distance runner. In order to really coach an athlete at the highest level, they have to trust and believe in you first. Tell us a few of your favorite cross country workouts and one of your favorite taper workouts? A hallmark of our program is our summer and fall trail runs. We have 8-10 of our “classic” trail runs, and every athlete has a favorite one. Our mile repeat loop along the river path is also a workout that every athlete that goes through our program knows well, and probably has some war stories to tell. Our Oregon drill with a few accelerators at the end is our “go-to” peak week workout. I can’t think of any other high school principals who also act as a head coach, how difficult is it balancing the two? No lie – It is tough. My only chance at pulling it off is staying ultra organized and doing as much pre-planning and work ahead of time as I can, as well as some long Sunday nights. I’m also very fortunate to have an extensive support system. First, my wife Kelli and my boys Riley and Logan, are very patient and understanding of my time commitments. Our assistant coaches are fantastic and handle all sorts of facets of coaching and logistics. Our captains and upperclassmen leaders are well versed in our program and culture and do a great job of pushing the team forward. Lastly, our Assistant Principals and office staff are strong, capable leaders who are helpful and patient with my crazy schedule. I am very lucky to have people who support me trying to do both. Battle Mountain also has a Nordic ski team in the winter. How many of your cross country runners also compete in Nordic and how do you think Nordic impacts their running? We work hand in hand with our school’s Nordic program, and fully believe that both programs benefit from each other. I’d guess that close to 2/3rd of our X-C athletes participate in Nordic in the winter (others do Alpine skiing or other winter sports). Run training conditions are tough in the valley in the winter, as the trails, fields, and tracks are all covered in snow, and the roads are usually icy and dangerous. Nordic provides the athletes with a non-impact, strong cardio workout as well as a mental and physical break from running. We’ve found that athletes are well positioned for a great track season if they focus on Nordic with a few days of running and lifting per week. We enjoy watching our runners compete well in Nordic too! How have you evolved as a coach over the years with regards to say coaching style, temperament, and actual training methods? The old timers from our program would say that I take it way easier on the current teams than the groups from my mid 20’s. There probably is a lot of truth to that. I think as a program, we have become more intelligent about maximizing every step we run, and not adding unnecessary mileage or pounding on the body. We have also maximized injury prevention measures in every part of our training. We probably employ more speed training then we did 10 years ago as well. We also have moved toward a “volume over time” approach, looking at the development of our athletes over a 4 year period. Looking at the development of our athletes in this way enables us to focus long term, and not get too caught up in small setbacks or training interruptions. Final question, after an amazing 2017, how does the future look for the Huskies as you lose seniors to graduation and the younger runners funnel in? Graduation is always tough on our team (as well as any other team). Not only do we lose many of our fastest and most experienced racers, athletes, but also we lose our leaders with strong team connections who are able to form the heart and soul of our teams. There are many younger athletes looking to step into leadership roles and carry on the tradition we started At this point, the team culture of hard work, expectations and staying focused on team goals will continue. And of course, we’ll look to have a good time while working toward our goals!
Interview with Matt Canterbury – Colorado Mesa University Cross Country Coach January 18, 2021 0 1 Matt Canterbury has been the head cross country coach at Colorado Mesa University in Grand Junction, Colorado for four years. We’d like to thank Matt for taking the time to answer some questions and to get the perspective of running for a Division 2 college in Colorado. You ran cross country and track at Augustana College in Sioux Falls, SD and Chico State University in Chico, CA. Tell us about yourself and what type of runner were you back in high school and college? I ran for East High School in Sioux City, IA, about an hour away from Sioux Falls. I ran XC/Track and focused on the 800/1500 in high school and college. I ran relatively low mileage in high school and ran 50-60 mile weeks in college. My body couldn’t handle more mileage than that! Tell us about the recruiting process at Colorado Mesa University, what does the scholarship situation look like at the D2 level in terms of numbers on the men’s and women’s side and are most of those partial scholarships? We look for athletes who, first and foremost, have a solid academic background. Then we look to see how they could benefit the team in both XC and Track. The last part of the process involves trying to get athletes to visit our campus. We have an extremely modern campus and outstanding facilities, and we enjoy showing recruits what it would be like to be a student-athlete on our campus. 12.6 scholarships is the max for DII programs, but in my experience, very few programs have the full amount. They are mostly partial scholarships. I’ve spent a good amount of time in Grand Junction and Colorado Mesa’s campus has really improved over the years. Even parents that I’ve talked to that have visited, are pleasantly surprised. Looking at your roster you have a lot of runners from the Denver area. Grand Junction has a different vibe than Denver, to say the least, does that present any hurdles during recruiting? The biggest hurdle is convincing potential athletes and parents that Grand Junction and CMU exists! I’m continuously surprised by the number of people on the Front Range who haven’t heard of CMU or who don’t realize how close Grand Junction is to the Denver area. Grand Junction is an outdoor adventure playground and there are miles and miles of great running trails. That’s why getting recruits to visit CMU and Grand Junction is such an integral part of our recruiting process. When recruiting Colorado athletes what type of 5K times do the boys and girls need to be running to be in the scholarship discussion? Your roster has a ton of Colorado kids on it, is your first preference to find in-state kids? We look for men’s times to be sub 16:00 and women sub 19:00. We don’t put a preference on in-state athletes versus out-of-state athletes. Distance running in Colorado is very deep so it’s natural that we have a large number of Colorado athletes on our team. Looking at last years cross country schedule, your season was really short (two months) with not a lot of meets. It looks like you ran six races including the NCAA Regional meet which I assume was limited to just varsity? Tell us about traveling at the D2 level, is the team flying or taking a bus to meets in Hays, Kansas, Chadron, Nebraska or Canyon, Texas? We are road warriors! With the exception of the Roy Griak Invite in Minnesota, we take vans or buses to the other meets. The longer trips, like the one to Canyon, TX, are broken up into two days. Yes, only our top 7 men and women race at the NCAA Regional meet. We try to race every other week. The 100% effort during races is really hard on the body, so racing once every two weeks helps us minimize the effects of traveling and racing. Does Mesa or a typical school in the RMAC have a shoe sponsor, such as Nike that provides the kids with shoes and some clothing or are you working within your internal budget? I can only speak for CMU in terms of team gear. We have a partnership with Under Armour for team-issued clothing. Shoes are the responsibility of the athlete. What type of ancillary work do your cross country athletes do in terms of strength and mobility work and is this work programmed, if so how often? We are in the weight room two days a week. Most of what we do focuses on mobility and correcting muscle imbalances. We do perform some lifts, but it’s always with low weight/high rep. We also use our Human Performance Lab to diagnose muscle imbalances or glitches in form. It’s all about injury prevention for us. I think it’s safe to say the RMAC is the premier D2 conference when it comes to cross country. What types of challenges does this present to a school like Mesa when you have to compete with powerhouses like Western State and Adams State on a yearly basis and now Colorado School of Mines. We have a relatively new program in terms of how long our team has been in the RMAC. The schools you mentioned have great traditions behind them, and that’s what we want to establish. The challenge is convincing top recruits that we can compete with schools that are near the top in the nation every year. It makes us work harder at recruiting and it makes us train smarter and harder. Can you tell us about training, where does the team do most of their training runs and what type of mileage are the top men’s and women’s runners logging on a weekly basis? During the Fall we do most of our runs and workouts on trails and at local parks. There are a lot of great trails near campus, some more technical than others, but it provides a lot of variety for our athletes. Our mileage is individualized, to an extent. A rough average for our men is between 60-80 miles per week. For women, it is 40-60. A lot of it depends on the individual. Last question, what advice do you have for high school runners that would like to run at the D2 level, in terms of getting recruited and making a positive impression on a collegiate coach? Be proactive about being recruited. Contact coaches and do your own research on schools and their running programs. Then set up times to visit your top choices.
Interview with Dee Brown – Iowa Central Community College XC Coach January 18, 2021 0 1 Prior to my senior year of high school, I attended the Luther College Distance Running Camp. It’s where I fell in love with Luther College and ultimately decided to run for the Norse. Dee Brown was heading into his senior year at Luther College and worked at the camp. I remembered him as a bandana-wearing, high energy guy, who was passionate about cross country and brought an infectious joy to running. Dee came back to Luther College during my final couple of years of college and worked as an assistant coach with the distance runners. Dee is now the head cross country coach at Iowa Central Community College, in Ft. Dodge, Iowa. Since taking the reigns at Iowa Central, the Tritons have won three national championships on the men’s side and six on the women’s side. He was profiled in Runner’s World back in November, “Is This the Toughest Job in College Running?” Coach Dee Brown was gracious enough to discuss running at the junior college level. Congrats on an amazing 2017, the Tritons hosted the NJCAA Cross Country Championships and won both the men’s and women’s National Championship. You’ve built a junior college powerhouse since arriving at Iowa Central, what do you attribute your success to? A lot of hard work, and hard-working assistants. I have a great administration to work under here and that is a large part of why I am still here 14 years later. You won’t find that just anywhere. Our administration wants us to be successful and will do whatever they can within their power to support our athletic programs and coaches. Looking at the Triton’s cross country roster you have runners from Peru, Kenya, Spain, Israel and Poland. How do you convince these kids to come to Ft. Dodge, Iowa and run for Iowa Central Community College? Also how difficult is it for the international kids to adjust and how do you assist them during that transition? Some kids I find via recruiting services, others I find through coaches in those countries that I know or coaches at Universities in the United States. If an athlete is not an NCAA qualifier, those schools will often reach out to a Junior College to help place them with the hopes of getting them back in two years. I can’t even imagine how hard the transition is. I know if I had to go to a foreign country, only speak and hear their language, eat their food, be expected to go to school and learn and then train at a high level, it would be very overwhelming. Especially if the training environment is vastly different from their own country, which it often is. For the students that arrive in August it is much easier. We report about 3 weeks early and do some team bonding activities, so that helps them orient to their environment and get to know people much easier. However , Kenyan student arriving in January. WOW! SHOCK!! That is a tough transition but these kids are tough, they are resilient and driven to do well. Having coached a lot of talented foreign runners, how is their mindset different than say a typical runner you pull from an Iowa high school? A student-athlete coming from another country is making a HUGE commitment. They are all-in compared to your typical local student who can probably go home any time they want, do some laundry, get a free meal etc. So those kids coming from afar definitely have a different mindset. They know they are in for the long haul. They have a job to do (school) and they are going to get it done. They are very highly motivated and willing to take risks to accomplish their goals. Can you tell us how recruiting works at the junior college level? How many scholarships are you working with on the mens and womens side? Also how do you target athletes that you recruit, I’m assuming that a lot of high school runners don’t have much interest in going the junior college route, at least initially? That’s a huge question with lots of parts. Recruiting at the Junior College level is different than anywhere else because it is non-stop. 75% of my team is brand new every year. We get a lot of kids that come in for our traditional 2 year programs, but many come in for 1 year programs, or started somewhere else and come here to finish up for a multitude of reasons. Students from our local area can feasibly have a year of college done with dual credit through their high schools so they only need 1 year here before moving on. At the NJCAA you are allotted 10 men’s and 10 women’s scholarships for xc. In Track you have 20 men and 20 women. HOWEVER, a scholarship is defined differently and by each school. I have a certain budget, and I can divide it up however I need for those 10 people. That doesn’t mean I have anywhere near 10 full scholarships. Not possible. I would bet most junior colleges in the NJCAA, at least in cross country, would be lucky to offer 2-3 full rides. There is probably only a small handful with that ability. Most junior colleges are probably giving a thousand dollars or so per athlete and likely not even giving out 10 scholarships total per year. I target anyone with interest and I target people with a high talent level. We get referrals from Division I Universities who are recruiting athletes that are non-qualifiers, perhaps a low ACT/SAT score, missing core requirements or GPA, or an international student with a low TOEFL score. There are 3 big reasons students choose a junior college like Iowa Central. (1) Cost. We are far cheaper than any other in-state option or private college. (2) Academics. Smaller class sizes, more 1-1 attention, greater safety net with more people looking out for them or guiding them through their academic career. (3) Athletics. They want to use us as a stepping stone to get to the next level. Perhaps they didn’t get the offers or looks they wanted out of high school. Now they have 1-2 more years to mature, have big meet experience and exposure right away. We take athletes to big meets all over the Midwest and US. They get to see a lot of campuses and a lot of coaches see them. This high degree of visibility, plus knowing they are “college tested” makes them very desirable recuits. The NJCAA also has a half marathon which is rather unique, I’m thinking only NAIA schools also offer the half marathon is that correct? Can you tell us a about the half marathon race, is it separate from the Cross Country Championships? I know when I was 18 or 19, I would have never considered running a half marathon, do you have to nudge a few kids to run that distance or are they volunteering? I believe the NAIA offers a marathon in conjunction with their national track meet. The Half Marathon championship is typically the week after the XC Championship. Everyone on your eligible roster may compete. You score a 5 person team, with your top 3 as scorers, last 2 as pushers. Scholarship kids are typically (for me) required to do it, I’ll nudge some, but others can choose. It is a fun event, many want to at least give it a try. Our long runs throughout the season prepare them for the rigors of the race. Our men will build up to 15 mile long runs whereas our women will max out around 12 to 13 miles on Sunday mornings. Do you know how many junior colleges offer cross country and are the numbers of junior colleges that offer the sport increasing, staying steady or dropping in numbers? There were 111 colleges last year in the NJCAA Division I that offered men’s and/or women’s cross country. Every year we lose a few and gain a few. It has been steadily growing since I started here 14 years ago. There were about 62 NJCAA Division III programs this past year as well. Walk us through a typical week of Triton training. How many miles per week will your top mens and womens runners run? Do you incorporate any strength or mobility work within the program? Sunday Long run. Monday off / Team Meeting Tuesday Hardest day of week. Early season hill repeats, mid season becomes race pace repeats of 800, 1k, 1 mile, 2k. Wednesday recovery run Thursday moderate work out with a tempo run or speed day Friday usually running the race course if it is a race weekend. Saturday race. Everyone is very different. Depends what you did in high school, if you are a frosh or soph with me. On average a typical varsity freshman guy could get up to 50-65 miles for their max volume whereas a female would get up to 40-45 miles. We do core every day for about the first 3 weeks, then once school begins we are in the weight room at least 2-3 days per week either doing circuit training, Olympic lifts, or medicine ball drills. We also add in hurdle drills. What’s your overall take on youth running in America? The talent that is coming out of the youth levels, especially on the girls side has been incredible of late, taking special note of Katelyn Tuohy’s 5K time. What are teams doing right and what could they do to improve? Tough question, I don’t do what everyone else is doing. My only opinion is to let the young kids be young kids, have fun and not run them year round. Let them play other sports, encourage them to be multi-sport athletes. Enjoy their youth. There is no need to specialize, you have a long road ahead of you. Coaching at junior college is different in that you only have the athletes for two years. The better runners that you have coached, are most of them going on to four year colleges and how do you get involved when schools start to recruit your athletes? The vast majority of our kids go to four year schools to continue running. I get a few kids every year that come here just to say they gave college running a try because they know after Iowa Central they are going down the road to the state university where they will ‘just be a student’. That’s fine with me. I am glad I can provide them that experience. Often times I will surprise those kids and find schools that ARE interested in them and will offer them a small scholarship to continue their running career. That is always in the back of my mind. I love to see kids continuing to run after they graduate. Like I said earlier, we go to lots of big meets and I have lots of connections with coaches around the US that respect our program. After a meet weekend it is not unusual for me to get multiple emails, texts and phone calls about so-and-so. What is he doing next year? When is she graduating? Etc. I have an individual meeting with each athlete in the fall when they arrive every year to talk about running and academic goals. Sometimes they will help narrow their search geographically or by academic major. Then I can weed out some of these recruiting calls. Otherwise I just forward those messages on to them and if they are interested in hearing more either they or I will contact the coach to get them connected. I always tell them, I work hard to get them here, if we are the right fit, but I work just as hard to get rid of them and find them a good home somewhere else. At Luther College, I think it’s fair to say you weren’t setting any records or contending for any individual titles but everyone always thought highly of you as the team guy, motivator, captain. You graduated with a degree in Computer Science, but when did you realize that coaching was your true passion? I went to college to major in something where I could make a lot of money. I was young and didn’t know any better. I never considered what would make me happy. After I graduated, strike that, immediately after my last track and field competition while on my cool down…. I felt a void. It was a huge void, like I just lost a dear family member. It was hard to reconcile that such an important chapter of my life had just come to an end. I moved to Minneapolis to start my ‘high paying job’ and was lucky to enough to get involved in the Northwest Run Club where I could work with and coach adult 5k/10k runners. It wasn’t exactly what I wanted but it helped ease the pain of not having my teammates in my everyday life anymore. I did that for 6 months until I was given the opportunity to use my computer science degree and assistant coach back at Luther. I jumped at the opportunity. I went to work an hour early so I could get off work an hour early for practice. I did that for a couple years but it helped me realize my passion was in coaching, not computers. At that point I knew I needed to go back to school. I looked for some graduate programs in coaching or physical education. I found an amazing MS in Physical Education program at Springfield College in MA. I moved out there earned my degree and found my way back to Luther teaching full-time in the Management Information Systems program as well as assistant coaching. I did that for 2 more years until I realized I wanted to be a head coach. I basically packed up all my belongings and my family and lived in the basement of one of our family members for six months until the opportunity at Iowa Central came along. It was love at first sight. I planned to be here for about 5 years and BAM! 14 years later and still having fun at it.
Interview with Coach Mark Wetmore January 18, 2021 0 2 University of Colorado coach Mark Wetmore has been the head coach at CU for 23 years. In that time CU has won seven national titles since 2000. His bio speaks for itself, Coach Wetmore is one of the top cross country coaches in America. The Colorado Coyotes are extremely grateful for Coach Wetmore to answer a few questions on youth running and what it takes to run at the next level. You’ve been a head coach at CU for over twenty years now, how has your approach to coaching changed over the years? I’d like to think that I have gained patience and further knowledge, though, at my present age, it is possible that I am losing patience and knowledge. Tell us about how you recruit runners to CU? How many scholarships do you have to give out on the men’s and women’s side and in general how many of those scholarships that are given out are partial scholarships? Well, that’s pretty complicated. Of course, we pay attention to high school performances, but grades matter a lot, and character. We also consider geography, injury history, the athlete’s racing schedule, the recommendations of coaches and guidance counselors. In the end, each recruitment is a unique case. Cross Country is allowed no scholarships in NCAA Div. 1. Distance runners all must come from the 12.6 allotted for Men and 18 for Women in Track and Field. Almost all Track teams work with various partial scholarships. When recruiting athletes to CU, how difficult is it to predict which runners will improve the most? Are their specific things that you look for, be it mileage run in high school or their grit factor? It is an imprecise science. We do our best but are nearly as often wrong as right about who will develop and who won’t. What’s your take on high school cross country and track programs currently in the US? What are programs doing better and what do you think they can continue to do to improve? I personally think high school athletes race too much, and/or have too little time between racing seasons. The growing availability of nation-wide competitions, and the willingness of the parents to fund those trip results in young athletes racing hard for many months on end. I avoid those athletes in recruiting. There has been a huge shift in the last ten years with kids specializing in sports at an early age? What’s your take on youth specialization when it comes to running? I am comfortable with young athletes “specializing” maybe after 9th grade. I strongly feel that young people, athletes or not, are encouraged to participate in too many activities. Do one or two activities, do great in school, and get nine hours of sleep! I was listening to a podcast with Anson Dorrance, the legendary women’s soccer coach at North Carolina. One point he drove home was building a culture where his players compete for a greater purpose, that being the team. Cross country is a unique sport in that it’s a team sport but also an individual sport. What does CU do to help build that team environment, that you’re running for the Buffs? I have great respect for Coach Dorrance, but we do it differently here. I never give any speeches about “team” or “character” or culture. Our work load is so high that the people of weak will and commitment are soon self-eliminated. One of the biggest obstacles young runners face when running a lot of miles in high school and in college is avoiding injury. What does CU do to help prevent injuries in cross country? Cross Country is one of the most injured sports in the NCAA, more so than Football. To compete at the NCAA Div. 1 level, one must work very hard, frankly, dangerously hard. We are all on the edge of overuse injury most of the time. So we stay in good shoes, eat smart, rest carefully, fix small injuries early (we hope). Here at C.U., we have world-class medical support and rehabilitation resources. But we still have injuries. None of our ten Olympians went through his/her career without injury. I would be happy for a reliable solution. It’s been sixteen years since “Running with the Buffaloes” came out, what was your opinion of the book when it came out? When you talk with high school runners, or collegiate runners that you coach, have they read the book? I have never read the book, but people who are in it, and have read it, seem to feel it was fair. These days, young runners say to me, “My Dad has this book…” What advice would you give to middle school or high school runners that would like to run at the collegiate level? Well…if no high school or middle school coach was listening? Be patient; keep it fun; under-race, do great in school, get nine hours of sleep. Last question, you’ve been in this game a long time and accomplished so much. What keeps you motivated and what goals do you still have left to accomplish? There is always something that keeps you hooked. Sometimes I fantasize about being a beach-comber in Hawaii, or becoming a lousy painter along the Seine in Paris. But then along comes a compelling athlete and I am stuck again. I have a number of those here right now, and some new ones committed for next fall, so no beach for a few more years it seems.
Interview with Coach Steve Magness on Youth Running January 18, 2021 0 2 Steve Magness is the head cross country coach at The University of Houston and the author of “The Science of Running” and the upcoming “Peak Performance: Elevate Your Game, Avoid Burnout, and Thrive with the New Science of Success” coming out on June 6, 2017. When it comes to the science of running, Steve Magness is one the top minds in the world. The Colorado Coyotes thank Steve for taking the time to answer a few questions via email on youth running. Thank you for taking some questions from the Colorado Coyotes! You have a new book coming out in June called “Peak Performance” what can you tell us about it? Part of my quest in becoming a better coach and runner is to look outside of our narrow field. Peak Performance is a culmination of that journey. I talked to world-class musicians, artists, venture capitalists, CEO’s, and thinkers, and tried to find what made them able to reach the top of their fields, but also stay there. In Peak Performance, I go through what both the best and brightest do, and what the research says. The lessons learned cross domains, and I really think there are key ideas that an artist might take from a runner or vice versa. That’s where I see future breakthroughs coming from. What’s your opinion on the state of youth running in America? In particular, the middle school and high school programs that you see? What do we do well and what can we improve upon? They do a really good job of getting kids excited to run and train. Where I think we sometimes fail is transitioning that into a life long pursuit of the sport, and in making sure that the kids keep developing throughout their teens and twenties. When it comes to youth runners, what running workouts deliver the highest ROI? It’s not about getting the most improvement now, but instead setting yourself up for the most long term improvement. At those ages, it’s important not to get greedy. Establish the foundation off which you can build your running career. That means establishing good mechanics, developing an aerobic foundation, and an enjoyment of the sport. To me, the extremes (i.e. good form and sprint work along with good easy running) are the foundation for this age. One question I get asked a lot is about footwear. I’m a proponent of minimalist running shoes and flat shoes for the school day. I know people’s opinion differs when it comes to running shoes, but what’s your take on running shoes for young runners? When we’re young we can establish movement patterns a lot easier than when we’ve got hundreds of miles underneath our feet. When it comes to shoes, I’m a fan of trying to develop good natural mechanics and strength in the feet. That means, allowing the foot to develop and function as much as possible. When you recruit high school runners to the U Of Houston, what does that process look like and how many scholarships are available? With each school, it varies on scholarships. By NCAA rules, men have 12.6 total and women 18 total to use for an entire track team. That’s not per year, that’s total. So you think of all of the different events and it’s really hard to get a significant chunk of that pie. At Houston, what we look for, even more so than times, is how you will fit in and are you willing to put in the work. A negative attitude kills talent. When evaluating talent and girls in particular, do you have an effective gauge to tell what kids will improve once they get into your program? Also, how do you compare runners who may have run faster times but were running a lot of mileage in high school versus a runner who came from a lower mileage program? I always do a deep evaluation of their past training. What I’m looking for is does the kid have somewhere to go. Meaning, we get better when we can add a stimulus to the training program. So is he or she maxed out in almost every variable or are there some holes in the training where we could easily fill them? I feel like most cross-country coaches know the benefits of a dynamic warm-up versus static stretching. I actually see more static stretching pre-game at high school basketball and football games. Is there still a place for static stretching in a middle school or high school running program? I’m not a huge fan of static work regardless. If people feel like they need it, then afterwards it isn’t bad. What are your favorite strength and mobility exercises for youth runners? I’m a big fan of developing movement in different plains. So anything that challenges runners to become athletes is good in my book. We do a lot of med ball work right by the track because it gives us the flexibility to get work in without being constrained by a weight room. The push for sports specialization in America has never been higher and now clubs are more than willing to take parents money and train their child year round. What are your thoughts on sports specialization and if a youngster has a strong desire for running, what would be a good age to specialize in running? It’s a real shame the direction we are headed. You do NOT need to specialize in order to reach your potential. In fact, specializing early is more likely to ensure that you never get the most out of your talent. There’s a reason that in school we make sure that all students learn math, reading, arts, science, and a wide range of subjects before we get into advanced degrees and specialize. The body and brain both function best in the same way. They need a wide base of support before the specialist/specific work needs to be developed. You had a great Twitter post titled “Women Vs Men” which showed a group of women on the track running 3-4 abreast and a group of men running single file. In Po Bonson’s book “Top Dog” he wrote about how women and men differed when it came to competition and to your point women are more likely to run in groups to keep the status quo, whereas men have no problem hammering each other in practice. I’ve noticed this in Coyotes practices with the girls running in groups, where a faster girl will slow herself down for the sake of the group. What’s the solution here? You have to recognize the differences between men and women and coach to them. Neither is necessarily better or worse, they are just different. For instance, women will be just as competitive, if not more so, than men, but they need to feel like they have a chance in the fight. If they don’t, they won’t try. Men on the other hand are delusional, they always think they have a chance. So, the solution is to know your athletes and set up the environment to get the best out of them. In our women’s group, we do a lot of mixing and matching and less strict group training. We rotate people in and out. Final question, what advice do you have for youth running coaches and for parents of youth runners? Youth coaches are the most important. They set up the patterns for which their athletes will view the sport for the rest of their life. Take that responsibility seriously! At the college and even professional level, you can trace the mindsets of the runners back to their early competitive days. If they had a hard nosed coach they were afraid of, 10 years down the line, the athlete still displays a fear of failure when racing. As youth coaches, you control how the athlete sees themselves and their sport for life. Send the right message.
