Need some motivation during those tough moments in a race?

We have all been there before.  You are in the middle of a race.  You are working hard to stay with the pack.  Your coach is yelling at you.  The pace is picking up.  Do you keep pressing or do you let go?

Peanut Harms calls it THE COMPETITIVE MOMENT.

The following link is a series of edited excerpts from a keynote address by Billy Mills.  It's well worth the read especially for those of you heading down to Arcadia.

You can find it at http://www.thegunlap.com/

For those of you that have never seen the last lap of the 1964 10000m. race, here it is (LOOK AT MILLS, LOOK AT MILLS!):


Here is another youtube clip of Billy Mills explaining the lead up to the Olympics.  It's from Ultimate Athlete, Pushing the Limit by Discovery Channel.

Fundraising opportunity for one of my runners

One of my runners is a volunteer at Coyote Point Museum.  In order to keep up with their expenses, the museum does annual fundraisers.  This year, members of the museum are running a half marathon (13.1 miles) this Sunday to raise money.

The link to donate to Team Coyote Cruisers is http://active.com/donate/coyoteptmuseum to make a general donation. Contributors donating at the Woodlands Level or higher will receive two free passes via mail, and donors at the Mountain Level or higher will receive an annual membership in addition to their free passes.

Thank you in advance for any contributions to the museum.

Albert Caruana
Crystal Springs Uplands School

Heart and Sole - Elite Mile

Heart and Sole is going to be hosting an Elite Mile Friday night, May 7th, at the end of the Santa Rosa HS All City meet. The goal is to have the fastest miles for both men and women ever run in Sonoma County. We already have some solid confirmations, and are expecting two amazing races. More information can be found on our website: http://www.heartnsolesantarosa.com/elitemile.html

Alex Wolf-Root
--
Train Hard. Win Easy.
University of California at Davis '09
Maria Carrillo High School '05

Chabot Track and Field in 2011

Dear Coach -

Happy Easter! And I hope you have had a great track and field season so far.  

I know 2011 is a long way off,  but as they say you always have to plan for the future.  

The reason for this email is let you know that despite the state budget cuts,  Chabot College and the Chabot-Las Positas Community College District will have track and field in 2011.

How do I know for sure...well in 2011,  I will again oversee the track and field program at Chabot College.   We will offer a program that serves both Chabot and Las Positas College.  

Just as Las Positas offers a cross country that serves Chabot College students we will make sure students that live in the tri-valley area have the opportunity to compete in community college track and field.  

Las Positas College is scheduled to have a completed track stadium in 2011 and I am working closely with the Administration at LPC to be able hold track and field practice at both colleges in the Spring of 2011.  For those Chabot College athletes that have an interest in running cross country we will have a program available for them at Chabot in the Fall, but they will officially run for LPC.  Our goal is to meet the needs and interests of our student-athletes and see them develop to their fullest potential.  

Chabot College will again host it's Summer All Comer Meet Series, fully automatic timing, beginning on Tuesday evenings on June 22nd - (Go here for the Summer All Comer Meet Information -http://www.chabotcollege.edu/facsites/pages/index.cfm?teacherid=27&pageid=61)

In the next few weeks I will try to come by and meet with you on your campus about your athletes.  In the meantime, if you have an athletes that may have an interest in running track and getting a solid inexpensive education in General Education before transferring please give them my name, number and email address.

Thanks and Good Luck with Remainder of Your Season,

Ken Grace

Chabot College Track and Field

510-723-6662

KGrace@chabotcollege.edu

Northern CA Track & Field leaders through. April 3

http://theconningtower.blogspot.com/2010/04/northern-california-high-school-leaders.html

Anybody missing from above list?

Northern California Track and Field coverage...

Skyline's Hart hard to catch (insidebayarea.com)

Marin briefs: San Rafael High's Ehlenbach, Harris shine at distance event (marinij.com)

HIGH SCHOOL TRACK AND FIELD (santacruzsentinel...scroll down)

Heart and Sole Elite Mile (heartandsolesantarosa.com) <---check this out

Avis Kelley Invitational results (lynbrooksports.com)

Stay tuned for more interviews this week, updated Northern California rankings, newspaper coverage, more training links and much more.

Arcadia is coming up as well.  What Northern CA athletes and relay teams will have the biggest impact at Arcadia?  What are the most anticipated races?

Sports Science Update: Dehydration Does Not Cause Muscle Cramps

Read more: http://running.competitor.com/2010/04/features/sports-science-update-dehydration-does-not-cause-muscle-cramps_9199#ixzz0k2eJJTfKNew study explodes old myth.

Written by: Matt Fitzgerald

Ask 100 runners what causes muscle cramps during exercise and at least 60 of them will say it’s either dehydration or electrolyte depletion or both. This idea goes back more than 100 years, yet it has never been supported by well-designed scientific studies. In fact, most studies have found that hydration and electrolyte levels are higher in athletes at the moment a cramp strikes than they are in non-cramping athletes who have performed an equal amount of exercise.

One challenge to proving or disproving the dehydration theory of cramping is that it is very difficult to study cramping in a controlled manner. As Ross Tucker pointed out in The Runner’s Body, “Perhaps the greatest problem affecting our understanding of muscle cramps is that no one has yet created a laboratory protocol in which scientists can deliberately induce muscle cramps in a controlled, reliable manner.”

Until now. In a study newly published in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, researchers at North Dakota State University used electrical stimulation to induce muscle cramps both before and after subjects cycled indoors in a hot environment until they were 3 percent dehydrated. The objective was simple: To see whether less electrical stimulation was required to induce cramping in the calf muscles when subjects were dehydrated than when they were hydrated.

In fact, there was no difference in the amount of electrical stimulation required to induce cramping before and after dehydrating exercise. This is very good evidence that exercise-induced muscle cramping is caused by a fatigue-related factor rather than by dehydration or electrolyte depletion, as fatigue is always present when cramping occurs “in the field” but was removed from the equation in this study.

Add this finding to already existing evidence against the dehydration/electrolyte depletion theory, such as the fact that cramps always occur in individual working muscles instead of throughout the body, as one would expect if they were caused by dehydration, and the fact that cramps usually go away when an athlete stops moving and stretches or massages the muscle, which measures do not affect dehydration.

Read more: http://running.competitor.com/2010/04/features/sports-science-update-dehydration-does-not-cause-muscle-cramps_9199#ixzz0k2eJJTfK

CCS F/S Top 8 Meet Results posted...

thanks to Hank Lawson and www.lynbrooksports.com

http://www.dyestatcal.com/ATHLETICS/TRACK/2010/fs_res.htm

Prep notes: Mountain View track team has new coach, high hopes

To say the Mountain View track and field head coaching job was thrown in Steve Kemp's lap may be stretching it a bit. But, it's not far from the truth. One week after he was hired as an assistant, then head coach Evan Smith offered Kemp the top job.

"Maybe coach Smith was burned out coaching both boys and girls," said Kemp, 56. "He just told me he was going to quit and asked me if I wanted the job."

Kemp, in his first high school coaching job, isn't just some guy off the street who took the job on a whim. He's a three-time World Masters champion, winning the 100-meter hurdles in Puerto Rico in 2003, the decathlon in Japan in 1993 and the pentathlon in Eugene, Ore., in 1998.

A native Canadian, Kemp came to the South Bay to train for the 1980 Olympics as a decathlete.

"There were world-class throwers everywhere you went," Kemp said. "I just hung around with them. The all-comers meet in Los Gatos had some great athletes back then."

Kemp, born in Belleville, Ontario, returned to Canada and won the decathlon at the Canadian Olympic Trials. However, Canada and the United States joined more than 60 countries in a boycott of the 1980 Games in Moscow.

To read the rest of this article, go to the following link:
http://www.mercurynews.com/peninsula/ci_14806703

The key to running fast on race day: Muscle Tension

Getting fit is rarely the problem. It does not take a genius to get an athlete in good physical shape. The problem arises when we need someone to be ready to race at a specific time. We’ve all experienced a race where we completely fell apart from the start of the race and felt completely off, despite going into the race with training going well. How does it happen?

If I knew exactly, I’d be a genius, but one thing that could play a role is muscle tension. It partly explains why we feel good one day and flat the next. Have you ever wondered why most coaches have you do strides the day before a race? Through experience, most have figured out that if you do just a little faster stuff the day before a race, you feel really good the next day. One of the reasons is muscle tension.

So, what is this mysterious muscle tension? This might anger some of the scientists types, but its best to keep things simple. We can get incredibly complex on explaining what resting muscle tension is and how it can be altered, but when we do that it loses it’s practicality in application to the real world. With that in mind, here’s the useful simplified way to look at muscle tension.


To read the rest of this article, go to the following link (this should be one more blog to follow daily):
http://stevemagness.blogspot.com/2010/03/key-to-running-fast-on-race-day-muscle.html

Thoughts on this subject?  What other aspects affect race day performance?