MVXC Completes A Second Week Of Practice

Creating fitness is like building a brick wall.  Each brick might not seem like much by itself, but a few hundred–or a few thousand–and you have a wall.  A few million and you have the Great Wall, something that would be hard to envision if you were the person with the very first brick in their hand when construction started.  Race fitness is about stacking mile after mile, workout after workout, day after day diligently, one workout stacked on top of the last, until you see something in yourself that you never saw coming.   MVXC has been stacking workouts for two weeks of 7am starts so far this season.

And it’s time to start a new school year!  Darn it…too bad we can’t just be professional runners for the rest of our lives, get up at 7am for a run with our MVXC teammates, wrap up by mid-morning, shower, breakfast, maybe meet with some friends for boba and an afternoon of gaming or anime.  That wouldn’t be so bad, would it?

Here is some of what MVXC did this week:

• Round two of hills at Linda Vista, a longer set that last week.
• “Dirty 4s”, including a debate on the difference between ‘a little bump’ (Coach) and ‘that is a gut busting HILL for crying out loud!’ (Sydney and several others).
• A pre-tour of the Watermelon time trial course.
• A visit from Jenny Xu, class of 2015.  Jenny was a two-time CCS meet podium finisher, was on two State meet teams and went once as an individual, held the school 3200m record (her record was broken), and still holder of the DMR record.  Jenny went on to MIT, where she ran on the cross country team, graduated early, and opened her own game development studio.  Jenny still runs and is a Boston marathon qualifier.  Jenny dropped by to look for beta testers for a new fitness game her team has developed, run with us a bit, and talk about her running in high school, college and post-collegiate. 
• Running Horse+Garrods, plus exploration of a few alternative routes including Julia’s Monster–backwards!–and the Prospect-Railroad exit that coach loves but few athletes will tackle but two did–by choice!

Here is a quick reminder of the MVXC practice schedule going forward:

• Monday:  4:10pm to 6:10pm
• Tuesday:  4:10pm to 6:10pm
• Wednesday:  3:25pm to 5:25pm
• Thursday:  4:10pm to 6:10pm
• Friday: 3:25pm to 5:25pm
• Saturday:  7:00am to 9:30am

If we can end practice early any day, we will release you early.  If we start to run late, you can leave at the scheduled time without any problems…the major exception is this Thursday, August 25, Watermelon day…we always run longer that day.

Remember you must be cleared at this point!   You have to be athletically cleared before practicing with the team.  At this point, we are really looking for freshmen or transfer students (we understand that freshmen may have been bewildered by the paperwork and we cut them a little slack).  Sophomores, juniors and seniors who have not been cleared until this week will not be earning PE credit this season and will only be added to the team on a case-by-case basis, depending on how prepared you are, how dedicated, etc.  

Here are the current athletes on the MVXC roster; if you are not cleared and want to be on the team, please take care of this right away!

Hills Week 2:

Homestead Loop:

Palm Ave Route:

Dirty 4s:

Jenny Visit:

Horse-Garrods-Prospect just getting rolling…

A dedicated athlete getting a little extra work after practice…could be a flash cut of a training montage in a Nike ad…