As we finish out the last few weeks of the school year, it’s time to start looking ahead to the 2016 cross country season.  Mandatory practices don’t start until August, but with the first meet on August 27th you don’t want the start of practices to be your first days running.  Those athletes who started running in May and June last summer saw what an impact it made this past season, and we want to give all our runners the opportunity to do the same.

Our training philosophy centers on a four-stage approach (we’ll detail this more in a later post), and it all starts with building base mileage. This gets the muscles, joints, heart and lungs conditioned to the stresses of running and sets up a foundation of endurance.  This is key to avoiding injuries like shin splints that can plague and even derail your season in the fall if you try to do too much too quickly.  It doesn’t take much… 30 to 60 minutes a day, four to six days per week can make a tremendous impact and see your mileage (and in turn, your endurance) increase very quickly.

We will be having voluntary open runs two to three times per week to give runners a chance to train as a group. These runs are open to everyone…all ages and abilities…and are designed to help build up base mileage. We will meet at different locations to help keep things interesting, and we’ll have some swimming and other fun activities mixed in as well.  Details will be finalized in the next couple weeks, so check back for details.  In the mean time, it’s never too early to get out and get started. Every mile counts!