Polls

Polls have always been something I look at with amusement. Most of the time it is someones best guess or a match up on paper to see which team is better than another. To me polls have always been interesting but nothing more than that. Since I arrived on the NAIA scene polls have more weight to them. They can determine weather a team makes it to nationals or not. To me this is absolutely ridiculous. If you have schools that always race on fast courses or historically have been good but are having down years they are just considered to be good because they have always been good. Cross Country is one of those sports where every course is different, they might not even be the same distanced based on how they are measured etc... It is very hard outside of head to head competition to judge how one team would run against another. But each week I still find myself checking the NAIA web site http://naia.cstv.com/sports/m-xc/2009Ratings.html http://naia.cstv.com/sports/w-xc/2009Ratings.html to see where the pollsters think our team matches up in the conference. And as of right now I would say they hit the nail on the head for where we are right now. I will say that I am excited to see what will happen at the conference meet when we finally match up head to head with something on the line.

On the women's side we started the year off in 9th, we then moved up to 7th for two weeks after our first meet and the latest poll has us at 6th. As I said earlier I feel this is a honest representation of where we are right now. I do feel that if we can pull things together for the end of the year we could place higher but we will have to stay on our game and keep making major improvements.

The men started the year off at 5th, after our first meet we dropped to 6th which again was justified with our number 3 man going to the meet as a spectator. The next week we moved back to 5th without racing which always makes me laugh and this week we find ourselves sitting in 4th.

The next two weekends should tell a big story about both teams. If we can continue to improve and be successful we will be set ourselves up very nicely for a great end to the season. With the way workouts have been going I have the utmost confidence in our ability to run our best at the end of the year and realistically that's all that matters. Only time will tell.

Creating the whole athlete

Fitness and developing the whole athlete are two of the main concepts that I feel are important while building a program. Right now we have our sprinters, jumpers all working together on gaining a base. Starting next week we are going to divide them up into two separate groups and start working on short and long sprints work. All of them will continue to lift and go through our core/plyo/agility stations. With the distance runners I feel that developing the whole athlete is one of the most important things. The more "athletic" they become, the more efficient their form will become, the less likely they will be to becoming injured. Most runners only run, which means that they are only moving in two planes, forwards and backwards. This can cause imbalances in the muscles which can lead to injuries. If we can do exercises that work side to side movements and working some of the ancillary muscles we can help prevent this and fix some of those imbalances. I am hoping to get some video of our stations to put on here soon and some of the exercises that we work do to become more athletic. The group has come a long way even in the short time since we got together for camp, and I hope that they can continue to make leaps and bounds with our drills.

Missiouri Southern Stampede

We had another very successful meet this past weekend. We had three men, Smith (26:48), Griffin (26:51) and Baxter (27:14) and one women Delker (21:18) make it into our top 10 list. We had two more freshman PR for their high school distances (Smith went from 17:10 to 16:49 and Carpenter went from 19:39 to 18:40) while running the college distance of 8k and 5k. And to top it off 12 of the athletes ran faster than their projected times yet again, all in all a very impressive weekend for the Bulldogs. While all of these things are what we are striving towards, we need to remain focused in the weeks to come with some more high mileage weeks and early morning runs left in front of us. This is the most difficult time of the season with school work starting to pile up and miles being high to keep on track. I feel this team is up to the challenge. We are staying on top of our class work and they continue to work hard every day at practice. Each day I get more and more excited to see what this group is going to do in November.

5k
1 Brittany Delker 21:18.0
2 Katie Logan 21:43.0
3 Kati Beam 23:23.0
4 Paula Carpenter 23:34.0
5 Krissa Fuentes 24:48.0
6 Katey Taylor 27:50.5

8k
1 Kyle Smith 26:48.0
2 Shaun Griffin 26:51.0
3 Mike Baxter 27:18.9
4 David Parry 31:14.1
5 Matt Brown 32:12.1
6 Zach Dowling 33:47.5
7 Fred Miller 37:47.8
8 Ben Denton 43:58.0


Our next meet will be at Oklahoma State University for the Jamboree. This is the oldest cross country meet in the nation and will be another great test for us. We have handled running against the top programs in the nation very well and I expect we will continue that trend in Stillwater. If you want to see the nations best this would be a great meet to come and watch.

Track conditioning

We started track conditioning on Monday. We have kind of a mixed bag. We have some people who are in good shape and we have some people who are not in very good shape. Everyone has been working hard. We have some work to do on our core strength. I think this is an area in which we are lacking severely right now but by May we will be much stronger and it will show. I am going to film our cross kids going through our core stations some time soon so I can post it on here for everyone to see. This is something I feel is very important for overall strength and injury prevention.

WSU recap

we had our first meet of the season on Saturday. I was very pleased with how we competed. This was a very competitive meet but I thought we got in there and mixed it up well. This is a great place to start this phase of the season. We had two lifetime PR’s, Kyle Smith split a 17:10 for 5k which is a PR, what makes this even more impressive is that he still have another 1000 meters left in the race. Paula Carpenter also set a PR for the 4k with 14:52. We had 7 people run better than their goal times, which it a great sign. We also had 8 people run around or better than there time from our 3k time trial and once again we had another 1000 (girls) or 3000 (guys) meters left in the race. Our theme for the team is SUCCESS and making sure each day we try to be as successful as we can. After looking at these results we were successful this past weekend.
Yesterday at 6:30 am we got right back to work with a long run. This week will be a down week in our training to let them recover from our “camp” weeks. I have them on two weeks up one week down training cycle. Then next week we will gear up for Missouri Southern, which should be a big meet for us. I have been very happy with the enthusiasm and effort the team has been putting in day and day out. If they continue down this path we will have a very SUCCESSFUL season.

Place, Name, 1 mile 2000 3000 3 mile 5000 6000
1 Kyle Smith 05:25.0 06:44.0 10:04.0 16:34.0 17:10.0 20:24.0
2 Shaun Griffin 05:25.0 06:46.0 10:11.0 16:44.0 17:22.0 20:40.0
3 Matt Brown 05:46.0 07:19.0 11:15.0 19:10.0 19:55.0 23:45.0
4 Dan Meibaum 06:28.0 08:11.0 12:23.0 20:52.0 21:38.0 25:54.0
5 Fred Miller 06:58.0 08:46.0 13:15.0 22:10.0 23:01.0 27:15.0
6 Ben Denton 09:19.0 11:50.0 17:44.0 29:09.0 30:14.0 35:15.0
Place Name 1000 1 mile 3000 2 mile 4000
1 Brittany Delker 04:13.0 06:47.0 13:08.0 14:01.0 17:06.0
2 Katie Logan 04:13.0 06:47.0 13:18.0 14:17.0 17:39.0
3 Kati Beam 04:17.0 06:58.0 13:48.0 14:46.0 18:19.0
4 Torey Fry 04:19.0 07:07.0 14:13.0 15:11.0 18:44.0
5 Paula Carpenter 04:37.0 07:30.0 14:52.0 15:51.0 19:39.0
6 Krissa Fuentes 04:56.0 08:00.0 15:31.0 16:34.0 20:21.0
7 Alycia Faust 04:57.0 08:01.0 16:08.0 17:19.0 21:26.0
8 Katey Taylor 05:19.0 08:57.0 17:34.0 18:52.0 23:37.0

First meet this weekend

As we are 64 days out from conference we are getting ready for our first meet this weekend at the Wichita State J.K. Gold Classic. Information on the meet can be found http://www.goshockers.com/ViewArticle.dbml?SPSID=61295&SPID=2840&DB_OEM_ID=7500&ATCLID=204782375. The Men will be running a 6k and the women will be running a 4k. I wanted to find a meet that had shorter distances to open up with to give us a chance to get our feet wet and race without having to dive in head first. This should be a good meet for us to do that. I am excited to see what both teams can do.



Training has been going well, we got some solid miles in this week and had a great Tempo run on Tuesday, we have also been in the weight room twice this week. For a lot of the athletes this is there first time in the weight room and I am excited to see the gains we get from spending time in there along with our core circuits. These two things alone should help with injury's and fixing imbalances. Overall I feel we are ready for our first test. This will also mark the first time in many years that the McPherson College Cross Country program has two full teams at a meet. Hope to see some of our fans out there as we get started on our 2009 XC Campaign.