The Tour De Mountaineer – Day 2
The Challenges of the Easy Days

 It is a common mantra among runners: keep the easy day easy! Many non-runners ask how can running 10 miles be easy?  They are not wrong of course, not in any normal sense anyways, but to a cross country runner it does make sense.  It makes sense the same way that it makes sense that two 250lb men will run head long at full speed with the intent to do harm and call that fun, or football. It makes as much sense as having a little white ball thrown at your head or chasing a black piece of rubber around a sheet of ice. I could go on, but I won't. We all get the point.

 It was cloudy and cool in the evening at 7:00 PM. The schedule was made when the highs were in the 90's each week. Bill Brasington '81 (my trusted assistant) pulled up the Kelchner Fitness Center in his late 90's model pick up. Bill was driving today which is always fun because he drives like a fugitive most of the time. I buckled up for the two block ride. There waiting for us early as always was team captain Carly Daniels dressed in the most dad shirt like shirt ever! Complete with wrinkles. The team has their own spirit week going one. Yesterday was anything but a water bottle day and today was dress like a coach day. We laughed so hard we cried and then left harder when Angelina Colon and Anna Duncan came dressed as Coach Bill and Freshman Anissa Lyttle came dressed as me in a perfect flowered shirt with a cave man and woman figures on it.  I think I may buy it from her.

Of course, everyone was early except the freshmen and a pretend growl from the head coach opened their eyes while the knowing upper classman giggled.  It is hard to keep a straight face sometimes.

 The challenge for the day was to run their easy day at the correct calculated pace. It is not easy to do as good athletes like to push.  We use the Vdot calculator as a guide basing their pace off their result from the Trial of Truth.  Each athlete picked the distance they would run based on their current training level from 3 to 6 miles. They then calculated their overall times.  The one closet to their goal time overall would claim the winner.

The women are a determined bunch and want to get everything correct 3 of them Morgan, Duncan and Colon, tied hitting their exact times over all. Claypool was off by a 1 second and Daniels by 8 seconds. Lytle showed her freshman skills being fast by 45 seconds. Ties are broken by rank order of finish so Morgan remained in the lead with 37 points with Duncan at 32 and Colon at 30.  With no points for the other categories the leaders remained the same.

The men varied a little bit but it was the freshman who had been 2 minutes late to practice that won the days. Simpson added 11 points for the win to his score snagging the Maillot Jaune from senior Christian Tanner who was a mere 5 seconds off pace for 6 miles. Isaac Showers ad Simon Richards each finished with just 2 seconds. Simpson will wear yellow for the first time with 3 point lead over Tanner and 5 points of Seth Neal. The White Jersey moves to Freshman Josh Dixon and Tanner moves to Blue.

The next stage is "Perfect Pace" where each athlete will try to hit their exact pace for their goal race paces.