Youthful Exuberance and Pine Hill

Well, when you try to teach, you keep learning, that's for sure.

I thought that Mondays were the most well-established, predictable days of our training week. All season, the team has been doing over-distance on Mondays. We began modestly, with runs that everyone could handle, and increased the duration of the run gradually over several weeks until more than half the team was able to run for more than an hour and still recover for the races/workouts in the upcoming week. Now, we're cutting back our over-distance runs in preparation for the final three weeks of the season. I thought the theory and practice of Mondays were well understood.

So when three of my runners asked if they could run on the hilly trails at Walden Pond on Monday, instead of the flatter run the rest of the team was doing, I said "sure, as long as you stay together and don't run for more than an hour." Big mistake.

It turns out that these guys had more in mind than putting in their boring hour of aerobic running. No, they wanted to test themselves on Pine Hill, the steep, steep grade that rises from Rt 126 across from Walden pond straight up to a reservoir at the top of the hill. From bottom to top, the hill is probably about 400 meters, and it is very challenging. Last year's team ran one workout there, doing a few repeats of the hill. I had decided this year that even though hill workouts are great, our short season and overall lack of preparation didn't warrant a lot of emphasis on hills, except the garden variety hills we encountered on our runs around town. Maybe I was right, maybe I was wrong, but as a result of that decision, the boys hadn't had their courage tested on Pine Hill yet.

I shouldn't have known something was up. Two of the three runners were coming off real breakthrough races a week ago and their enthusiasm over the past few days had been the highest it had been all year. They had tasted success and they wanted more. And they figured that the way to have more success was to work harder (admirable!) and improvise a really hard, new workout on a day normally reserved for a long, moderate run (somewhat less admirable).

After an hour, they weren't back yet.

After an hour and a half, they weren't back yet.

After an hour and forty-five minutes and the dispatch of the team van to begin the manhunt, the three of them walked back on to campus. "We did what you told us," they explained. "We didn't run for more than an hour." Well, so they had been listening. "We did repeats of Pine Hill - seven of them, all the way to the top." Ok, so it was selective listening. Somehow I had failed to communicate the purpose of Monday runs, and the need for progressive adaptation to training stresses.

At the very least, this is a teaching opportunity. I am not angry with them for wanting to improve. I am a little bit angry that they were out for 1:45 and that they improvised a workout that will, I suspect, leave them somewhat lame for tomorrow's meet. But even so, there's a chance to learn something here. For one thing, training is not a matter of throwing down one great workout and then spending the next week recovering. It isn't something you do just when you feel like it, when you feel youthful exuberance and a sudden impulse to test yourself on the toughest hill around. Training is the hard work AND consistency.

It's hard to have that perspective sometimes when you are young and fast and feeling good.