Hello again!

I know most everyone's postseason is probably getting started up right around this time, so I wish everyone the best of luck!

Just to quickly fill the readers in: My season is really just getting started. At the beginning of the season, I sat down with my coach and we discussed when we wanted to race and what would set me up best to run well at our State meet. This year is really important to me, as I have had terrible luck with XC my first three years. Somehow I managed to get sick three Octobers in a row and thus, none of my seasons have finished the way I'd like them to. So we decided to run a very small amount of races and just train hard through September.

I raced our home meet, the Andy Wells Invitational, and placed third in the 3mile in 14:49, behind two super-talented guys in Ryan Teel and Bradley Dohner (little brother of Ryan Dohner, UT's number 1-2 man). If you don't have those guys on your radar, you should get them. They are cross country animals.

My second race, and my last one before our district meet a few days ago, was the huge and renowned Nike South Invitational, in which I unfortunately was plagued with two pretty nasty side stitches from 2-5k of the race. I tried all the little tricks to get rid of them, but they only got worse. I faded from sitting comfortably and relaxed at the back of the front pack at the mile to finishing somewhere around 45th I believe. After that outing, I had an amazing 2 weeks of training in which I ran a few great workouts such as 16x400 (first 8 in 70-72, last 8 in 67-69), a ten mile hard aerobic effort in 53:40, a great session of K's right around 3min/kilo with little recovery, and a race simulation workout in which we did a hard quarter, 64, to simulate the first part of a race out of the gun, a little bit quicker than race pace quarter, 71, a three mile tempo in 15:38, and then a solid 800 in around 2:22-2:24 to simulate picking it up the last half mile of a race.

These workouts set me up well emotionally, psychologically and physically for our district meet this past Thursday. I sat right behind my good friend and great competitor, Brigham Hedges, and we somewhat eased our way through the first 4k, and the last 800 we gradually picked it up. With 60 meters to go, I tried to sprint past, and we ran neck and neck for 50 meters and I was just outleaned at the tape. Brigham is a phenomenal talent, and actually has the fastest 5000m time in Texas right now at 14:58.

Even though I didn't have that extra gear like normal, I feel that with a third race under my legs, I will keep coming around, and hopefully, by November 12th for State, I will be ready to prove that I can run cross, not just the mile. We have regionals coming up this weekend, and then Lord willing our team does enough to make it out, as well as myself, we will be in Round Rock in two weeks to leave it all out there.

Again, best of luck to all!

Justin

Editor's Note- Justin will be keeping a blog for us this cross country season so be sure to follow him during the course of the season.   

Join the DistancePreps Mailing List!!!