Holy smokes, what a week!
Workouts Continue
We continued to work ourselves into shape with another solid week of training. The sprinters and jumpers were ambushed a bit on Thursday as jump coach David Pride and sprint coach Leah Tapscott collaborated on a killer workout including plyometric jumps, depth jumping, hurdle mobility drills and short sprints. (Both coaches ran track for Stanford University, so maybe they concocted this deadly workout from their shared experience of Stanford Cardinal torture.) Your head coach and high jump coach were a little bit horrified by the description of the workout but the athletes hammered through the effort! We saw some really athletic work on the track–with both veterans and rookies looking good. This work will really show itself in athlete performance later this season.
It’s always useful to remember: Just because something is hard, that is not a reason not to do it.
Distance runners continued to rock with our first time this season to run a (muddy) REI trail along with a second week of the ‘new’ SCU-inspired version of hill repeats, and a rugged optional Saturday interval workout on the track. Hurdlers are getting closer to the day we haul out our fancy Gill hurdles and hurdling gets real!
Break Week
Your coaches are volunteering to be at the Monta Vista track Monday through Friday at 9am during the Winter Break! These workouts are optional, yet I hope that most of the team will take advantage of the coaches’ making themselves available. There will be coaches there EVERY DAY! Don’t ease up after two weeks of hard work; you have got through some of the hardest part of the physiological adaptations you make as you increase your training, if you take a week of now you will come back and find you have taken a step back–it is very frustrating to go through that initial soreness twice! Keep working out, you are doing great!
Welcome Leah Tapscott!
Monta Vista Track & Field gained a new sprint coach for the 2015 season! Leah Tapscott, a Stanford alum, has joined MVTF. Leah was a scholarship athlete at Stanford University, where she played soccer and ran track. After graduating from Stanford with a degree in human biology, Leah played pro soccer and worked as a consultant. Leah just found out that she was accepted to graduate school at Columbia University (New York City), starting this summer–so she was able to join us for the 2015 season! We are really fortunate to have an athlete and person of Leah’s caliber to join us for the season, both as a coach and a role model. Thank you to all the athletes who encouraged Leah to stick around! Parents, come introduce yourself when you come to a meet!
Parent Meeting
We held our annual parents’ meeting last Thursday, thank you to the parents who attended–I think we did a good job of sharing philosophy! If you were not able to attend the PowerPoint presentation is downloadable.
There were lots of questions about iron in our athletes’ blood and serum ferritin testing; here is an article I wrote a few years ago. Iron and young athletes is an important topic.
We are going to need a lot of help this year–we have a big team (over 100 kids on the roster!) and track and field is a sport that truly takes a village. Please get on the email list run by Abhijit Choudhury, and volunteer to help early and often!
Also, if you have not joined MV Boosters yet, please take a few moments, get on line and support your athlete here!
Alumni
A huge shout out to Bridget Gottlieb! Bridget was selected as a national academic All-American by the NCAA, and her Johns Hopkins team was selected as the cross-country academic team of the year! WOW!
Bridget also set a 5km PR while racing in Boston University at the Valentine Invitational, and Pearl Law was running the mile for UC Irvine in in the altitude at Albuquerque in the Don Kirby Elite invitational.
Los Gatos Great Race
Monta Vista track and field and cross country has raised more than $100 already–and you have committed to getting some exercise–from Monta Vista supporters who have signed up to run the Los Gatos Great Race! It’s four miles–you can do this, running, jogging or walking! You will feel better and support both MV athletics and also many other good causes. Read more here!
Congrats to all on another great week, and see you on the track!