Early season thoughts and our first "meet"

Becky and Me hanging out with Larry

As always summer went by way too fast.  The highlight had to be the CAVS winning the NBA championship.  Becky and I went to all three of the home finals games, we went down town for game 7, our coaching staff went to the team arrival at the airport and we all went to the parade (but who didn't, holy cow there were a lot of people in the Land that day).  Now its September Camp is over and we have our first meet tonight.  More on that later.

















It is always a little nerve wracking bringing in a group of freshman.  Did we get the right kids?  Will they mesh well with our current kids?  There are always a few question marks.  We been very fortunate so far.  We have an amazing group and we had an awesome camp!  The group has come together very well, they have raised the bar on expectations and set some high goals for the year.  The kids came back on Aug 16th and the freshman went right into the week of welcome.  We had our time trial, We watched one of our assistant coaches win a gold medal at the Olympics in the pole vault!  We had several team meetings.  We had a Brown v Gold inter team competitions, which were fun, and a lot of early morning practices.

Pizza at our house

Kat wins GOLD in Women's PV!

Watching the Men's 1500 at our house

Heated game of Rock Paper Scissor

Cooling down after long run on the Tow Path

White Pines Lodge at CVEEC

Crystal Lake

Friday after the first week of class we got to go CVEEC in the CVNP for our over night camp, which we didn't get to do because of Week Of Welcome.  The CVNP is my favorite place to run in the country, so to be able to stay in the park and get a few runs in there was awesome.  We went to Crystal Lake on Saturday afternoon to swim, kayak, play volleyball, fish and paddle boat.  It was a great first weekend of the year.  Getting to spend it with our team was great.  Its always good to start the year off with a lot of team bonding time. 

We open up our season tonight at Wooster.  Similar to last year we will enter our team in both races, 4k and 5k for women and 5k and 4 mile for men.  We will use the meet to practice a lot of race day situations, get our freshman accustomed to how we operate on race day.  We will run the races as a long extended workout and build off what we did last week.  I am excited to see how they handle the day.


Last thought for the day.  I have always loved looking at Pre Season polls and polls in general.  Very rarely do they mean much.  Its way to early to see how much work everyone put in over the summer, who will emerge as a rising star, how the freshman transition into college and the team etc... Either way they are fun to look at and see what the pollsters think.  The OAC polls came out not long ago.  I finally took a peak at them this morning.  Our women were picked 6th and our men were picked 5th.  Probably a fair assessment of our team right now, but I am excited to see how things play out on Oct 29th in Columbus!  Until next time.... RUN HARD!