The XC Season is Now Open

We finally opened the 2012 cross country season this past Saturday morning up in Logan at the Aggie Invitational hosted by Utah State.  This has been our opening meet in all but one of my eight seasons at Utah.  However, this is the third different course we have competed on.  That makes it slightly more difficult to gauge our overall improvement as a program.  However, as season openers go I saw some things I liked (we were aggressive, we positioned ourselves well early in the race) and some things that we need to fix (we were too aggressive at the start burning too much energy early, we must finish better even when we are tired).

We only ran a select group of runners who I felt were ready to race.  We held out several of our top runners due to extended track seasons, injury, or training schedule.  Most of them will open their seasons this coming Saturday at the Nevada Twilight.  The early season meets do not have any affect on conference or national rankings/standings.  I like to take advantage of that by getting our younger runners in some early races and trying some different combinations of runners.  This allows us to optimize training and practice time and race when I feel individuals are ready to make solid contributions rather than racing just because it's on the calendar.

I thought our top three (Susannah, Andrea, and Nikki) all ran solid races.  I liked the positions they were in early in the race, but they have to get to those spots using less energy.  Kate had her best summer of training ever and was a little more controlled in her early pace, but just needs some races. For some people no matter how great their training has been, they simply need races to maximize those efforts.  I would know because I definitely fit into that category and I think that is the case with Kate.  Megan ran her first race in almost two years after finally recovering from foot surgery.  She had an accessory navicular bone in her foot removed.  After a solid summer of training she will now work to get back into race form.

Next Saturday we will be at the Nevada Twilight and again we will race without all of our runners.  At least three runners who didn't compete in Logan will open their seasons. Two or three of our gals who ran at USU will not race.

The following video from USU was taken at 1000m into the race.