Week in Review
Last week was another busy one marked with firsts and lasts. Besides being the first full week of school, complete with our senior retreat, we got to try out the new trails at Legion Lake. We're grateful to Chad Sutterer and all the other individuals involved in bringing the project to completion. The boys in particular seemed to have a great time running around all of the berms.
On the flip side, our training is starting to shift toward specificity. That means moving from a base of aerobic endurance and speed toward race pace work. We had our final Neuro day of the season on Monday as well as our last long run for a while on Wednesday. One thing we won't see the end of soon is our fun days. Last Thursday that meant some pretty intense games of dodgeball.
We closed the week out on Saturday at Mid America's 5K Rally Run. This year it served as the Alumni Showdown for our former runners. We had alumni who ran on our school's very first team, those who graduated just a year ago, and many in between. I'm hoping this is a tradition we can grow and continue going forward!
The Week Ahead
It's race time! This week we get into race-pace work. That includes a workout with 600m repeats on Tuesday and some smaller bites of running at 5k pace leading up to Saturday's race. That also means a lot more time at our course as we gear up for our home meet next week.
We'll also have our first race preview on Wednesday, along with some kickball as we try to outrun this week's heat. Stay tuned for photos of some dingers in the making!
Jackson Meet Preview
Those with experience following our team know that the Jackson Meet isn't like the rest. First, rather than a single boys and girls race or separate races for varsity and JV, they run races for each grade. To avoid this turning into eight races across both genders, they stagger start the girls two minutes after the boys. Both of these will still be the case at this year's meet.
The Jackson meet is also known for its non-standard race distances, with a shorter race for freshmen. That trademark is actually ending this year. The meet organizers decided to set all of the race distances at a uniform and standard 2 miles. That means at least a somewhat new course for everyone. I reached out to meet organizers for some sort of clarity about the new route but at this point have received nothing. I don't expect the course to be drastically different than previous years, especially over the first 1.5 miles. My best guess is that the finish will change a bit. See the map below.
My best guess about the course changes are either wider turns in a few places and the old freshman finish (blue) or an abbreviated finish to the old upperclassmen course (purple).
With the change in course length, the team records for the meet are set for retirement and a fresh restart. That means they should get one last mention. The boys record has an interesting story. Three different runners have finished within a second of 13:17 on the upperclassmen course, some before results were recorded to the hundredth of a second. Since Levi Krauss did it first, he owns the record, but Joseph Baer and Gabriel Anders each deserve a shoutout.
But things are a bit different on the girls side. If you check MileSplit or the record board in our school gym, you'll leave thinking Laura Steele owns the record at 16:13. However, in 2017 during her senior year, Corin Carroll finished fifth in her race with a time of 15:53, smashing Laura's record by 20 seconds. Trust me. I was there. So why isn't the result in the record books? Before having professionals time their meet, Jackson was notorious for being late, incomplete, or altogether absent with making their results public. There are no results on MileSplit for the 2017 meet. There is a Semoball article deep behind the paywall archives. I gave you a little screenshot as evidence. Semoball, in the unlikely case you're reading this, don't sue me. Corin, in slightly less likely case you're reading this, I'm sorry you never got the credit you deserved. I know how much you wanted Laura's 5k record. At least you got her on this one!
What Coach Learned
As we move into race season, this will be the last appearance of this segment for a while. Not that I won't still be learning things, but more of them will come from our races than from outside sources. However, this week I did read another study about chocolate milk. In this one, high school athletes in a strength and conditioning program were assigned to receive either chocolate milk or a sports drink following their workouts over the course of five weeks. The chocolate milk group saw five times the improvement in composite strength compared to the sports drink group.
I had chocolate milk for our athletes following our Midnight Marathon. It's also readily available in our Snocker. Some might find this an odd beverage for runners. Before a run (especially a race or hard workout), dairy products certainly aren't the best choice. But afterwards, chocolate milk is cheap, tasty, and nearly perfect. After a strenuous run, the body needs carbohydrates to replenish fuel stores, but it also needs protein to repair damage and undertake muscle growth. Generally sports dietitians for endurance athletes recommend post-run fuel that contains somewhere between a 3 or 4 to 1 ratio of carbohydrates to protein. A pint of chocolate milk paired with a banana hits this target on the nose. A sports drink like Gatorade does have carbohydrates, but it doesn't have a single gram of protein. But doesn't Gatorade contain all those electrolytes to replenish what was sweated out during the run? Sort of. There are four main electrolytes the body uses. The primary one is sodium, and Gatorade has a decent amount of it. But it only contains a small amount of potassium, the second one. And as for the other two, magnesium and calcium, standard Gatorade contains none. And then there's the fun part: chocolate milk contains all of these electrolytes, and every one of them in greater quantities than Gatorade. And unlike Gatorade, it doesn't contain any artificial dyes or flavors. It also contains less added sugar, as more of the sugars are naturally present. Again, I definitely wouldn't recommend chocolate milk in the hour before a race. A small amount of sports drink would definitely be preferred there. But when it comes to post-race recovery, chocolate milk takes the victory. 
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