October 12, 1979 (Friday)

From running log:
Cross country practice. 8 mile run on the roads (out Reedsburg Road). Quite cold, windy, 40F, including the first snow flakes of the season. Man, am I tired! Two races in the past three days. I didn't run well today, but that's okay. I will get in some runs over the weekend. Keep looking to conference meet. I'm gonna win.

30 years later:
That last sentence, "I'm gonna win", if taken out of context could sound rather cocksure. But I know differently. I wrote things like that in my running log, over and over again, when I was young. It was a self-motivation technique that I employed. I wanted to focus on the goal, I wanted to believe that I could accomplish that goal, and for me it helped both if I wrote the words down on the page. I no longer do this with the big goals in my life ... perhaps I should think about that.

There was less than a week to go before the race that I'd been training and planning for over the previous 5 months, ever since the end of the previous spring's track season. All of that hard work, all of that energy, all of that worry and anxiety, was about to come to a head.

We were already plotting out strategy for that conference race. During the run on this date, we ran together and talked about the teams that would be our main competition (Portage, Wisconsin Dells). We talked about how hard we had prepared. We talked about how each and every runner on our team was important to the outcome, how every man had to run the best race of his life. When I got home that night, I started making some notes on things I wanted to say to the team later in the next week, as the date closed in. For today, it was enough for us to have a shared, on-the-run experience as a varsity team. Everyone was on board. It felt great.