11.29.07

C-A-C Boombayay

Posted in Uncategorized at 9:22 pm by Joan

Remember The Name

My daughter, Sarah Jane, played the opening few lines of Fort Minor’s Remember the Name song from Youtube and I wanted to pass it along to CAC.

“You ready?! Lets go!
Yeah, for those of you that want to know what we’re all about
It’s like this y’all (c’mon!)

[Chorus]
This is ten percent luck, twenty percent skill
Fifteen percent concentrated power of will
Five percent pleasure, fifty percent pain
And a hundred percent reason to remember the name!”

C - A - C

Boom-ba-yay !

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11.24.07

Lost by 11 seconds

Posted in Uncategorized at 3:30 pm by Rob

I was a little disappointed by my finish at the Gallop and Gorge. No, I was not upset to finish behind Tom and the other guy who showed up. I knew that competing with those 2 would be virtually impossible. Rather, I was disappointed to lose to another guy - Rob Benjamin from 2006. He ran 25:38, and beat my time this year by 11 seconds.

I was on pace to better that time. I went through 3M in 15:17, which was 13 seconds faster than last year. Mile 4 hit me hard, however, and I went through 4M in 20:37, which was just barely ahead of last year’s clip. My finishing push was also a good bit slower, and the final result was 25:49. I was happy with my effort, and don’t think I could have run it faster with any other approach. It was more humid this year, and with similar conditions to last year, I think I would have held on better in the later stages. Several of my teammates also felt this way about the conditions this year.

This competition with myself is what keeps me going, and what drove me out of mini-retirement 3 years ago. It is the ongoing question we all ask: “Can I get better?” Can I find big and little ways to become a more efficient and faster runner?

I cringe when other people, not involved in running or similar competition, say “You are so competitive!” This, in my case, is only partly true. I am not caught up with trying to be the fastest. If I was, I would have quit the sport long ago. I have come in 2nd probably 15 times the number of times I have won. This never got me down, however, if I continued to improve and if I felt that I left everything out there at race time. This is still the case, which is a good thing when you consider who I am running with every time I line up with my teammates.

I am, however, extremely competitive with myself. I expect to beat my times from preceding years when I enter these races, and don’t want to know when that will end. It is an interesting question, though: “When will my consecutive years of training and racing be overwhelmed by my aging?” John and Joan have shown an ageless quality in their performances, and it encourages me that I have some time left, too. I sure hope so, anyway……..

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4:00.13

chalk it up to experience …

7 years

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11.21.07

interval training

Posted in Uncategorized at 11:03 am by Joan

After cross-country nationals, CAC will transition to the next phase in our year of periodization: the 100’s. Obviously, our marathoners won’t be sprinting turn-around 100’s, but all distance runner’s can benefit from intense, short-interval training.

Here is an example from Africa.

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11.20.07

I am thankful for races like Gallop and Gorge in Carrboro, USA

Posted in Uncategorized at 5:11 pm by Joan

Good luck to all CAC racers doing Turkey Trots on Thursday (or Saturday).

Please write in with race reports!

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11.18.07

are you ready to rrrrrrumble!?

Posted in Uncategorized at 10:10 am by Joan

My other team, seejanerun, just had their goal race yesterday … the 5 and 10-mile trail races, Raven Rock Rumble, in Lillington, NC. We rocked; we rumbled; and no one fell down or bonked their heads on a rock. I raced the 10-mile in cross-country spikes to get them warmed up for USATF cross-country nationals with CAC on December 8th. My seejanerunners will be with me in spirit (in “sole” - heh heh) when I toe the line in West Chester, Ohio.

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11.15.07

on the playground …

Posted in Uncategorized at 12:54 pm by Joan

Tonight, I am speaking to a room full of women who have come to running late in life. While considering what I might say to connect with these women (please, don’t make me replay that same boring “How I made the Olympic team” tape!), it hit me that how long they’ve been running or how fast they are doesn’t matter nearly so much as whether they LOVE it or not. I have always taken it for granted that I love running. It’s been a given in my life since grade school when I played “chase” every day on the playground (Scott Kilmer was the only boy I couldn’t catch … which is probably why he eventually became my boyfriend :)). Oh, the thrill of flying off across the blacktop in snow boots or school shoes - gear didn’t matter back then - to feel my lungs burn and my head start to get sweaty under that striped, stocking cap. I hated coming back inside, surrendering my outside clothes to the “cloak room.” Outside was freedom. It still is.

Does everyone see running as going outside to play like I do?

But I don’t just play. I play hard. When the schoolyard game of chase escalated one year to a game of capture (the boys would drag the tagged girls over to their bench to turn you into a, horrors!, BOY) I remember being surrounded and caught by a mob of boys. I threw myself face-down onto the snow-covered ground, literally digging my boots in, and refused to budge. The boys started pounding on my back, but I wouldn’t move. It hurt, and I was crying into the snow, but I wouldn’t give up. I never got turned into a boy.

Yesterday, a runner in my seejanerun group asked me how I deal with pain in a workout or race. I don’t even think about pain as a barrier anymore. Just like loving running is a given, so is taking pain. I see workouts and races as tremendous (and RARE) opportunities to scrub my soul clean. Nothing else in life is as straightforward and pure as the pain of an interval on the track. Life can pound you on the back - like those boys did that day on the playground - but running doesn’t; training hard and racing fast comes at you straight on. That’s a pure kind of pain I’ll take any day.

What about you?

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11.11.07

Blast from the past

Posted in Uncategorized at 8:44 pm by Diana

Yesterday, while getting a personal coaching session with Joan (the perks of not racing!), I was yapping away about this and that. At some point, as I was talking about my parents coming down for Thanksgiving, I found myself mentioning videos they have of a few of my high school tack races.

Suddenly, the conversation was all about what CAC members might have looked like racing in high school. I know that Sarah used to have REALLY long hair, and that Caroline spent all her time in basketball shorts doing suicides with her basketball teammates.

My parents have kindly agreed to dig out the videos and bring them down next week…what about the rest of you? What fashion faux pas and crazy running forms are you hiding from your early years on the track?

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11.08.07

Confidence Versus Humility - A Delicate Balance

Posted in Uncategorized at 11:43 pm by Dave

I’m thrilled that there is such a vibrant discussion in the comments of my last post on confidence. This is a subject I’ve been giving a lot of thought to lately.

I believe at the root of all high performers in any field is a delicate balance of confidence and humility. Confidence can be innate and learned through experience and I believe that sufficient humility is uncommon, but a healthy balance of the two is quite rare and is required for high level performance in most any worthwhile endeavor.

How many people do you know that are supremely confident to a fault? This is common. Every mistake they make is caused by something or someone else. The supremely confident already know the answers and if they’re collecting performance data (keeping a log) at all, it’s only to validate what they already think they know. They never truly believe that there are others that might have had experiences that they could learn from.

If you have too much humility, there’s no confidence, innate or otherwise. These people readily admit that they don’t have the answers and bounce from strategy to strategy as the wind changes direction looking for the magic bullet that doesn’t exist. They never give a particular strategy enough time to pay off.

The ideal balance between the two can be very powerful because the two really feed off of each other. Confidence can be cultivated through humility - creating a true and more permanent confidence. The best performers I’ve come across learn from their mistakes and don’t sweep them under the rug. They meticulously keep records of their performance and training and go back and review to find hidden mistakes (and hidden strengths). Underperformers can’t seem to find the time for this minutia which translates to “I already know the answers and don’t need to learn anymore.”

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11.07.07

The Psychology of Confidence

Posted in Uncategorized at 12:06 pm by Dave

I came across this great post about performance and how it’s affected by self-confidence and anxiety. The writer is a friend of mine and he relates the topic to trading, but it certainly has parallels with other performance fields (like running). Here’s a quote from the article about an interesting study:

One interesting study asked students to toss nerf balls into a garbage can. Half the students received negative feedback prior to the task; the other half received positive feedback. The negative feedback group performed significantly worse than the positive feedback group. Think about how ~~markets~~ races always give us feedback about our ~~positions~~ fitness and how this might affect our state levels of self-confidence, anxiety–and ultimately performance.

Self confidence is something I have no problems with in most areas of my life ;-), but as I get older and running becomes less of a priority it takes more and more of an effort to channel experience into self-confidence. Take my race at the Pumpkin Run. It was a poor performance, but I was able to run a second loop right afterwards in a respectable time along with BrockStar. In previous times this would be enough to give me some confidence to take away from the experience. Now I’m struggling to focus on the positive aspects of that experience.

Hopefully more positive experiences soon will right my ship.

Post-it Notes

Interview with Diana Rancourt

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