Blogs : Nigel Sharp

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.

Untitled Comment

12:27 AM, August 4, 2008 .. Posted by just4chillin

welcome to the blogs. best of luck training this coming fall. if you ever run into the name "chad sanada" at southern utah let me know. i ran in high school with chad and he attended s. utah a few years back.

Re: Training

6:33 PM, August 4, 2008 .. Posted by Anonymous

Nigel,

Looks like the training is going great and you're primed to compete well. Best of luck running this season at SU.

- Coach Syty