From running log:
Cross country practice, a hilly fartlek run. Did 0.5 miles warmup, 5.5 mile workout, and 0.3 mile cooldown for a total of 6.3 miles. We ran 8 times up Cardiac Hill. My back is a little stiff but holding up okay. My feet are kind of sore, don't know why. We had a team meeting today, but Chris Kelly wasn't there (!) We got some good rapping done. I'm a bit tired, hard workouts this week, need to run easy tomorrow.
30 years later:
Unfortunately, I no longer have my sheet of scribbled notes from this team meeting. As I recall, it was focused on helping the varsity runners identify specific runners from our rival teams that they should be working to beat. One decent strategy for high school cross country is the old "one up" approach. That is, if you want to beat a team you try to get each of your runners to finish ahead of each of theirs. Ideally, your number one runner beats their number one runner, then your number two runner beats their number two, and so on. In a way, this breaks up a team race into a series of individual battles, each of which can be "won" and thus add up to team success. For example, if Nellie was our 4th man on the day, and he beat the 4th man of the other teams, then he could feel victorious, no matter what his overall pace.
But we were actually pushing this envelop a bit more. We were thinking that we could really take it to the conference meet, and put all 7 of our varsity runners across the finish line before the 5th runner from any other team. That would put our stamp on the race. We wouldn't just win, we'd crush 'em.
Time would tell. We knew we had a lot of work left to do before we got there.
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