Cross country practice. 1 mile warmup, 4 mile workout, 0.5 mile "relays". Mostly on the road, Crawford loop. It was kind of a screw-off day. I feel fine, tho my back is just a little stiff. Relax. Win SCC. We had a really good team meeting tonight, and went over notes from H. Haslanger (via H. Simon). I also made a bunch of notes and we talked about every runner and what they needed to do.
30 years later:
While his doctor would no longer allow Harry Haslanger to coach our team, that did not stop him from keeping tabs on our performances, as well as attending other races to scout our competition. He had been thinking about the conference meet all season long, and in a conversation with the head coach Helen Simon he had transfered his accumulated thoughts and strategies to her. After practice, we held a series of team meetings. First, we sat with coach Simon to hear her read Harry's notes, scanned here (that's my handwriting at the very bottom of page 2):
So, the esteemed Harry Haslanger felt that I should not try to keep up with Mike Bennett, for fear that I would fade and hurt the team. While I respected his opinion, the truth was that he had not seen Jim Boehm and I demolish the field recently, and I knew in fact that it was Bennett who would have a hard time keeping up with us, and if he tried he would be the one likely to fall back and hurt his team. Sorry, Harry, on this one I had more information. I respected Mike Bennett as a runner, but I expected him to finish in 3rd or 4th place, duking it out with Matt Klecker of Reedsburg, while Mr. Boehm and I waged our own fight up front.
The suggestion to match up with Portage, runner-by-runner was a good one. In fact, I had been carefully tracking the runners from all teams in the SCC during the season (see scanned image below, sorry for poor quality), and had prepared to encourage my teammates to adapt that kind of strategy as well. Make the race into a series of smaller races, with each of my teammates tasked with getting the better of one or two specific competitors. I felt it would help us stay focused. From my careful tracking, you can see that while Connors still had the third best time, he had run that time almost a month earlier. Bennett had the 4th fastest time coming in, but he had run that time all the way back in early September. Those two had probably peaked a little too early. I knew in my heart that my only real focus had to be Boehm.
After Coach Simon went off to meet with her girl's team, it was my turn to get us focused. I met with the Varsity runners only, and went over my own notes. It's actually funny how many of my prepared remarks matched up with Harry's:
Well, you can certainly see that we were intense! I guess we were taking a bit of a Lombardi-esque approach, but we were young and this seemed to be the method for stirring up the strongest competitive juices.
We had two days to go ...
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