Thursday, January 28, 2010

What a difference a year makes

Two more days marks my arrival in McPherson last year. I remember leaving Meadville and its 30 inches of snow in the rear view mirror and Becky and I headed west for Kansas. Not really knowing what we were getting ourselves into but very excited for the future and our new start all by ourselves in the mid west. I arrived at McPherson with the assumption that all college teams were as serious as the programs I had been a part of or at least could easily be turned around into championship teams. I quickly found out that this was not the case. Almost on a daily basis I fought with people on the team trying to do things that I took for granted before I came to KS. Things like showing up for practice on time, doing a warmup, doing a cool down, actually coming to practice. I had some very hard weeks and some very hard days all of which were great learning experiences. Are things perfect today, no, will they ever be perfect, doubt it, are they better, much much better. Last year I dreaded going to practice just knowing someone was going to try to pull something or there would be some sort of confrontation. This year I love going to practice, we have a great group who works hard. Next Thursday we will have a meeting to decide who our team leaders are and what our goals for the season are. I am excited to see what this group can do, we have a lot of motivated people who want to do well for the team. It is an exciting time to be a part of McPherson College track and field.

Doing the little things

As I get deeper into my coaching career and I look back on my own running, it amazes me how the little things make a big difference. Sleep, and nutrition being two of the biggest. Making sure you are getting 8+ hours of sleep a night and eating a well balanced diet with lots of fresh fruits and vegetables. Its hard to train at a high level and stay healthy when you are not getting enough sleep and putting the proper fuel into your system.

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

New Years Resolution

I know it has been a long time since I posted on here. I hope everyone had a great holiday season and has had a great start to the new year.

My New Year’s resolution this year is to read more. I want to read at least a chapter of a book a night, and to spend the first part of my morning at work reading blogs, research articles etc about training, coaching, recruiting etc… I felt that since I have arrived at McPherson I have not done enough reading. I have read a few books, but I need to stay up with the most cutting edge training philosophies and I figured this would be the best way to do it. Currently I am reading Brad Hudson’s book Run Faster. It has a lot of good stuff in it. It also has a lot of things that I am already doing, or things I can tweet to make our program better.

Another New Year’s resolution is to update my blogs more often. So I will try and make a post on my personal blog once a week and on the team’s blog around the same. I also would like to have my assistants be more involved with the blogging process.