Wednesday Workout

From Coach Jerry:

It was an amazing day at Pikes Peak. I'm no GRC historian, but I have to think that Sunday was the best five-man performance for a 10k in club history. And when you consider the athletes who are race fit who did not run--Karl, Sam, Outlaw, Ryan--and throw in the athletes who are going to be race fit soon--Paul, Jake--it's obvious that we are making significant progress. As for the men who did run, we had great performances across the board. Wiggy showed that he is back to peak form and ready to tear it up the rest of the spring. Dirk continues to amaze me with his superb times off of almost no running-specific training. Burnham not only ran his best race in years, he was disappointed that he didn't run faster, which to me is a great sign that the competitive fire is back. Dickson ran a very nice PR as he preps for a strong marathon in Gettysburg. Dave Wertz continues to improve by leaps and bounds (see below for my detailed breakdown of Wertz's incredible PR from the NOVA newsletter). Andy ran a tremendous PR, exceeding his lofty goals. Murph shook off some disappointing workouts to run his best race in a long, long time, and this confidence boost will go a long way towards getting him ready to PR this spring. And Jordan showed that he can run better injured than healthy.

On the women's side, we had four excellent performances. Michelle ran a big PR and reinforced the conclusion I reached after watching her run one workout, which is that she's got Olympic Trials qualifier written all over her. Susan made a solid debut, and we're going to see much, much faster runs from her in the very near future. Beth ran a huge PR--80 seconds, to be exact--and is getting ready to kill it in Green Bay on May 14. And Emily ran an astounding time considering that she has not done a single track workout since her return to running. When we add in Lindsey and Kate, we've got ourselves a women's team that can compete on the national level!

The workout this week is at BCC. Note that next week we will be at AU. We'll have one men's group this week, as most of the A group is working out tonight to prep for Princeton on Friday (Karl, Luff, and Wiggy in 5k, Hanson in 1500). We'll do 5 x mile with a 400 jog, 5:15, 5:10, 5:05, 5:00, 4:55.

See you at BCC tomorrow.

Jerry

Dave Wertz's race was truly amazing. In the coaching business we talk about athletes having breakthrough races, and while I've been in the game for over 25 years, I'm hard pressed to recall many bigger breakthroughs than Dave had yesterday. His previous PR, which itself was a major breakthrough, was 33:32. Dave absolutely destroyed that time yesterday. Indeed, Dave ran a 5k PR en route, then ran the second half faster than the first half, thereby running a second 5k PR in the second half of the race. It's not like Dave is some jogger who just took up the sport--he had already established himself as one of the better local runners in the fall, but this performance is an improvement by an order of magnitude. And the fact that Dave has done this at age 35 is nothing less than remarkable.