It's summertime - time to get ready for Cross Country

During the summer months we get together a couple of times a week to travel to various locations in San Diego for variety, hill training, repetition training or to run with other schools. Other days you'll be running on your own or with your own group of friends. The most important part of summer training is to put-in the miles needed to build a base to carry you through the season. Championships are won during the summer, not in the fall. There are several get-togethers each week where you can go to run with others. One of the most popular with the high school group is the Patrick Henry Summer Running Series where runners not only from Patrick Henry but from many other schools meet on Saturday morning for a 45 minute to an hour training run. Everyone is invited and there usually will be groups suitable for any level of fitness.  Movin' Shoes also has runs that start at 6pm from their Escondido store on Monday and from their Pacific Beach store on Wednesday. The Monday Escondido series is sponsored by various shoe companies and free to all. Here is a flier with that info. The Wednesday series isn't on their website but show-up at 6pm for the run.  Another place you can get-in a quality workout is the San Diego Track Club's Tuesday interval workout run by their coach Paul Greer. While technically you should join their group, he doesn't mind if you show-up for a workout from time-to-time. As a team, we'll also travel across bridge for targeted runs. There is no schedule for that but if you get on our message board and we have your email address we'll keep you updated. The message board link is here (for now) but is also at the top of this page under the Tiki logo. You'll need a password to get to it the first time so if you haven't received it yet email me and I'll send it to you. This is also where I'll post more team specific info.  There’s lots of training info on the web some of it good some not appropriate for high school cross country training. There’s no magic workout that will make you a better runner overnight. The key is consistency and following a training plan to the end. Here’s a link to Alberto Salazar’s 10 Golden rules of running regarding Consistency, Recovery, Mileage Increase, Where to Run, Pace, Whole Body Strength, Shoes, Form, Pushing Yourself and Technology. It’s a short informed read. Several months ago there were links to a series of training videos he did for Mastertheshift.com. That spot is now occupied by a series Ryan Hall is doing for them so it’s based on Marathon Running. However when Salazar's presentation was up I downloaded all the videos and if I can’t find an archive link, I’ll upload them to my server. Part of Salazar’s presentation was a strength flexibility download that you can get here.