Camillus NY - After the success of Jim Vermeulen's XC Journal
in the many falls of Cross Country, we've asked again for him to
provide some news and notes once a month this summer. Think of these as
the thoughts that cross the mind of your average coach. Up from Section
3, we present you with "Thoughts From Three."
"There are no dress rehearsals"
Ted Levy
Taylor hit the initial slope of our Monte Vista interval circuit. A half-mile "9" with the upper circle perched atop a Central New York drumlins, most of the route seems to float above the neighborhoods below. The first job of each interval, though, is to climb the steep 200 meter leg of that "9" just to get up there. Once on top, Taylor gathered herself with deep breaths, then disappeared into the back side of the loop only to re-emerge wide-eyed, wary, but determined. There were more climbs to come.
An 8th grader selectively classified to compete on the varsity level, Taylor was being schooled to one of our winter training locations, a familiar site that, over the years, we'd come to depend on--though the place seldom generated any sentimentality among the runners. In December of 2015, our middle distance group trained the loop in T-shirts and shorts. Two seasons earlier, they once suffered through their intervals in a 17o shiver. As a thick plate of gloominess slide by overhead, our afternoon workout was somewhere in between. No matter. Runners had always learned to take Monte Vista for what it was and, weather-wise, whenever it happened.
Shortly after four o'clock, the sprinters were close to finalizing their workout of short, steep intervals. The distance runners, meanwhile, had settled in to the longer rhythms of their day. Up and around, bend and breath, jog down, turn, head up again--the slow count was interrupted only by the walk allowed between sets and accumulating fatigue. There is, after all, no such thing as an 'easy day' on Monte Vista.
Taylor had good company, however. With some team members still in transition from cross-country, she grouped with Kendall and Amanda, both veterans who had Monte Vista stories of their own to tell. Kendall, only a sophomore, was inaugurating her third winter on the hill and monitoring the pace, an essential task. The three of them steadily ticked off the count, working each interval to keep the compression tight. I stood on top of the steep rise, watching the sprinters gradually finish and retreat, leaving the hill to the distance runners and a gathering gloom.
Into their third set, things got hard, and you could name your favored model of fatigue at work. Whether it was accumulated by-products or a dampening of muscle recruitment or both of those directing the brain to take defensive action and issue insistent messages of pain--the choice mattered nothing against what the runners would decide to do with their final circuits. They knew what I wanted. After finishing #6, I greeted them with a nod and "dos mas." My earlier suggestion to "go negative" in the final intervals was just a benign--and perhaps more positive--way of telling them to suck it up and ignore those inevitable internal messages. For some athletes, that's asking a lot. In our age of instant tweets and text messages, young adults are subconsciously trained to ignore almost nothing. Fortunately, distance runners learn otherwise.
One of those Three Musketeers, however, was bent over longer than normal.
"Amanda," I asked, "you O.K?" Amanda was still, by her own admission, only 90% following a bout of mono that had eliminated her senior cross-country championship season.
She straightened and took a few deep breaths. "Yeah," she answered, smiling wanly. "I can make it." Then she jogged down the hill to join her waiting buddies.
I could have--but I but didn't--simply tip my cap to that. December, you could argue, is like cross-country's June. For our track seasons, most lies ahead. We're on the up side of that law-of-diminishing-returns curve, and runners tend to think and muscle through stuff that might otherwise cause pause. It's when everything's possible--and most still probable. Any uncertainly can, if you temper expectations and value the process, give rise not to concern but to confidence in what might happen. The work itself--the stresses, the recoveries, the adaptations--can be self-sustaining. Labor omnia vincit.
We've tallied, of course, our annual list of MIA's who hit the reality wall those first practices and quickly became non-team members. No Monte Vista days for those folks. And we've seen others about school who chose alternate intramural programs because those are, well, easier and require less commitment. Their loss.
Somewhere above that thick blanket of clouds our sun had set. Their work complete, Taylor, Kendall and Amanda were the last off the hill. They began, tired but satisfied, the jog home as dusk seeped into the neighborhoods. By any measure, it had been a good workout, another simple reminder that this is where the lessons lie.
Every day counts. Every mile matters. Despite the gloom, every sweat-bead glistens.