Week 2: Aug. 3-9
August 3: 4.4 miles easy (recovery day basically)
August 4: 7.3 miles in the morning with weights afterwards.
In the early evening I raced in a dirt track mile at Westmount HS Track. My friend John LoFranco was organizing it and I decided it'd be a good low-key way to get in some speed practice without sacrificing training too much. I ended up running 4:42 with a 62 second last lap, sitting and kicking never felt so good. All in all I ended up doing 5.1 miles at night
12.4 miles in total for the day.
August 5: 11.1 miles easy on Mont-Royal to keep the mileage up with some hill work in there, felt really good.
August 6: This day I was pacing a 10000m for my friend Iain Fyfe from Montreal. We went to Ottawa in order to do this, he was going for a 31:40 time which meant I had to hit 15:50 for 5000m and then anything after that was just gravy. After a good warmup of 4.8 miles I did my pacing job pretty much perfectly bringing him through in 15:49. I kept going for a short while after that but didn't feel as good as I thought I would. I guess base season can do that to you. He ended up running 31:41 so my pacing came in handy. 8.1 miles total for the day.
August 7: Another 11.1 miles easy this time in Kanata a suburb of Ottawa, kept up a decent clip and felt good the whole way through.
August 8: First day in Cedar City, Utah. Could only drag myself through 7.0 miles of easy running, first day of altitude + Jet lag = not good combination.
August 9: Double day Morning: 5.0 miles easy altitude really getting to me.
Late afternoon: 10.0 miles easy felt a bit better this time, I think I've been running the easy runs too fast down here because when I've checked my pace on the track its been around 6:10-6:15, I'm not sure if it's the base kicking in and helping me to that pace or if it's just that I'm simply going too fast. I'm going to definitely be trying to slow down the easy pace this week.
Weekly total: 69.1 miles, a little weak but with two events and a flight not too bad, hoping to get it up to 73-75 miles next week. Thanks for reading!
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Introduction + Summer Training
Hey everyone, my name is Nigel Sharp and I'm gearing up for my freshman season at Southern Utah University. I'm originally from Regina, Saskatchewan in Canada and I am very pumped for the NCAA Cross Country season. I consider 5000/10000 to be my best distances so XC is a natural fit for me because of the longer distance.
My PB's are 4:04/8:47/15:13/32:04 in the 1500m/3000m/5000m/10000m respectively. I am hoping to smash those in the winter and spring.
For summer training I decided to see how far I could push my body mileage-wise. My previous best in weekly mileage was only 70 so I was very eager to see how my body would react to the increased pressure. After a late start to the base season I got going in mid-July. First off was a relaxed week just to get in the swing of things, I logged 58 miles with a fun 3000m race in there at 8:54. The week after that from the 20th-26th I really decided to get going and logged 71 miles with a good tempo and a fartlek speed workout in there for quality. Finally that brings us to this week where I am one day away from a new best of 74 miles. I just need to jog a 13 miler tomorrow which should be very doable. For quality this week I threw in a 3.1 mile fast mountain tempo and a tough speed workout of 25x400m @ 10km pace(76ish) with 3 "hammer" intervals in the last half of the workout, the hammers went okay but not as good as I had done before, they were 61.4/63.0/61.1. The recovery was I had to go every 2 minutes, therefore for most of them I was going off 44 seconds recovery. The workout gave me a bit of confidence that I was still in shape even with not much speedwork but I know I'll need to be a lot faster in October and November.
Thanks for reading and I'll try to keep this updated as much as possible.
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