developing the whole athlete

I know I have written about this before but the more I work with distance runners and especially distance runners of the computer age I realize that you need to develop athleticism. As distance runners we spend so much time moving in the sagittal plane and some don’t even do that properly. There needs to be time spent working on becoming more athletic. Now don’t get me wrong you don’t get better at running by doing drills. But the more you can do the more you can do. If you cant stay healthy running miles you will never reach your full potential. In order to stay healthy or get stronger so you can run more you need to spend time doing functional strength and conditioning. I think you can do a lot of functional strength through incorporating into warm up and cool down activities. You can do a different series before easy runs, long runs, workouts, weight sessions. You can make some of these movements or drills core work, plyos, flexibility all wrapped into one. Functional strength should be worked on daily. Like running this is not something that can be improved immediately but you need to pay attention and make deposits in the bank often. Start simple and work to complex when the movements are mastered. Just remember the more you can do the more you can do. My two cents for the day.

Self education, expanding my horizons

I am trying to take advantage of this time as a volunteer coach at a D I school to expand my horizons as much as a can. We have such a great staff at Wichita State and I am very fortunate that most are willing to share there knowledge with me. Some areas I am trying to expand on are functional strength training, new/different methods of athletic training, marketing of track meets and recruiting.

Weight Room
Being down in the weight room while other teams are lifting has afforded me the opportunity to watch Adam Ringler http://www.adamringler.com/in action. Every time I see his groups at work I pick up some new things. He has been nice enough to let me pick his brain and is going to teach me the basics of Functional Movement Screen and go over some of the basics of his philosophy. I get to do this tomorrow and I am very excited. This is an area I feel I have a good grasp on but could use some work on how to “put it all together.”

Training room
Our training staff does some very cool things that previous schools I have worked for have not done. Mainly Graston and Kinesio taping. I have been teaching myself how to use Kinesio tape on myself and some of the kids on my team last year. I have some basics down but hope to pick the brains of Jeff Deits http://webs.wichita.edu/?u=athletictraining&p=/FacultyandStaff/Staff/jdeits/ who has more practice and has read more about the subjuect. He also said he would be willing to spend some time teaching me some of Graston techniques using Guasha tools http://guashatools.com/ So I am excited for some of these new lessons.

Marketing
I have been put in charge of coming up with creative ideas on how to get peoples butts in the stadium at our home meets. We have some good ideas but we have 2 home indoor, 2 outdoor regular season and our conference meet. Ideas range from HS invite sections at indoor meets, to tailgate party, carnival and music at outdoor meets. There are a lot of conversations I need to have but it should be very interested to see where it all goes from here.

Recruiting
I am not allowed to recruit. Which for me kind of stinks. But I am involved in conversations and brain storming sessions with fellow coaches in the office at practice or lunch and have been coming up with some good ideas.. Coach Wise also let me barrow Meat Market which is a book about college football recruiting, great stuff.

All of these have been in addition to reading as many articles and journals as I can find about all things running etc… I feel like I am expanding and become more educated so if and when I get a more permanent gig I will be able to have informed conversations with all the different people Coaches have to interact with on a daily basis.

new goals, fresh starts

Wow, it has been a very long time since I have updated this blog. I have a new goal of writing in here every day. So along with my goal of reading more everyday we shall see how this goes.

Since I last wrote in here Becky got a new job working for Sedgwick Co in the city of Wichita, so we have moved to Wichita and I have started as a Volunteer coach at Wichita State University with the cross country and track and field program. I have had people since I started coaching 7 years ago tell me that I needed to move to Division I. That was easier said than done, but WSU was nice enough to bring me on and it has been a terrific experience so far. Their coaching staff has over 90 years total experience at DI level and I have been trying to soak in as much as I can from the whole staff. I find myself following the different coaches around at fall track practice asking questions ranging from why this drill to what is next, and how do you progress from here.

So from here on out my goal is to write about my thoughts and experiences with this level. I hope you like it and if there is something you would like me to write about please let me know. I am excited to get back to writing. until next time......

Mentor's

Over the past few weeks I have felt a little bogged down with some administrative things at work, ad during that time I have turned to some people close to me who have helped me though a lot of different rough patches in my life. The two people that I turned to this particular time were my Dad and Kori Stoffregen who is the head coach at DePauw University, whom i started my coaching career with as a Graduate Assistant. Both of them were able to give me very different sets of advice and both sets were great for me to hear and things that I can take and work on.

I read Seth Godin's blog this morning and was reminded of how fortunate I am to have many different people in my life that I can call and speak with, some are people my age or younger. Young coaches or friends who are going through the same situations that I am right now. Some are people with 15. 20, 30+ years of experience coaching who have been though and are still dealing with situations that I have pop up or just people who I have known for a long time who I trust that they will give me a straight answer.

All in all I have had some great learning experiences and it is nice to have people to turn to for help when I need it.

Dog Days of Summer

As we plow through July, I have started spending more and more time in the office. I finally feel like I have my energy and motivation back after a long year. It has been fun the past couple of weeks we have started up group runs in town and it is slowly building. We had 8 this morning and have 5 or so on most. Hope that we can keep it going into the school year with the non students.

I have had an explosion of ideas lately and now its just a matter of me becoming more of an administrator which can be my least favorite part of this job and make the calls and rally the support to get some things done. On tap for next summer is a summer track series, a summer cross series, road race series, track and cross country camps and continue to grow the group runs.

As for now I am very anxious to get the kids back on campus and rolling. There is a ton of potential for both teams and with the right attitude we can achieve big things.

Next week I get to head home to OHIO for one of our two yearly trips. It will be great to see all our family and friends recharge a little then start xc season. I will be attending the NEO Cross Country camp for what feels like the 10th year now, which is always a great experience.

Learning opportunities

So my plans of going to USATF meet did not go as smooth as I was hoping. Like everything in life other things poped up and a miss communication left me driving solo up I35 to Des Moines by myself. The drive went by a lot quicker than i thought it would. I arrived in time to watch the Women's Steeple prelims, which B Fran dominated and I am very excited to watch her run the final, and the 800 prelims. During some of the sprint races I saw Salazar walk by and we saw him sitting on the turn with the 10k's coming up. I thought it would be interesting to listen in to him while the race was going on and after the races, so I wondered over a sat a few rows behind him. Michael Johnson also happened to be sitting a few rows behind me.



I am very glad I went to sit behind him during both the men's and women's races. It was interesting watching him interact with his athletes during the race and hearing the small feed back him gave them after.

I also had a chance to sit down and talk with my friend Brad Hunt, who is the assistant coach at the University of Virginia. He gave me some great ideas about working with long sprint/mid distance guys and working on building "volume" without always doing longer runs. Something I had never thought of before.

All in all it was a great day and something I learned a lot from. Its funny that you can learn new things when you least expect it.

Really USATF, really

I spent the past weekend at the USATF Championships. The experience was good for me because of the people I was there with and who I got to talk to. The meet itself was pathetic. I understand that it is a non championship year and the races are not going to be as competitive as the Olympic Trials, but I was not very impressed with how the meet was run.

The Crowd was absolutely pathetic. $20 a day to sit in the heat with minimal shade and not a single water fountain in the stadium is a little ridiculous. The last day the stands were maybe half full. There was hardly anyone on the back stretch at all. Mostly coaches or people watching the vaults, you need to do something to get people in the stands, revamp the schedule, drop the ticket prices, something….

As far as advertising was concerned you would not have known that there was a track meet going on in town unless you stumbled on to the stadium and asked someone. There was not a single poster, flyer, banner, billboard, or anything anywhere in town or around. It is sad when NCAA puts up billboards and posters around town for regional meets for Division III and USATF can’t put anything up for a National Championship. But they will pay $4000 to the winner of each race, and $3000 to second and down to $500 for fith and sixth. Why don’t we spend some of that money and try and put people in the stands. I feel like USATF needs to realize if there are no fans that there will be no sport. Our sport cannot survive on once every four years. There are too many people involved in High School track and field for our sport to be in the state that it is in. So why don’t we try lowering ticket prices, maybe even give tickets away, have fun kids activities, autograph sessions something to get kids involved, something to get peoples butts in the seats.

I understand that the races are tactical, most championship races are, but come on ladies and gentlemen if we want to compete at the world level we might need to run faster than the Jr’s are running. I know that depth was a big reason for some of these results and it is a sad state when a US National Championship doesn’t mean very much to people and they don’t even show up. I think that falls back on the USATF

There were several points in the meet where there were looooooong pauses. There was a 45 minute break at one point where they decided to scratch the women’s 200 to just semis and they did that the day of the meet. So we sat in the stands in 90+ deg heat and waited for 45 minutes with nothing going on. The field sizes at the meet were very small, and I do not understand this. This is a not championship year. Why not give some people a chance to run at a US national meet and get the experience. Make the field sizes bigger. I also heard several stories of people who did not find out if they were in the meet or not until a day or two out. USATF people have lives, they have to make travel plans, they have to get hotels and flights and some even have to take time off from work to go. One hammer thrower went to the meet even though he ended up not qualifying, but he was in the stands because he already had to pay for his hotel and buy the time he found out it was too late to cancel.

In summary USATF and track and field is in a sad state, the people in charge are not getting it done and if you were in Des Moines you would see that is the case. The National Championships should be a celebration of our sport each year and this was not.