Threshers Meet

 Bethel hosted a high profile meet last weekend, with around a hundred runners each in the men’s and women’s races. Our performance was not as good as last week unfortunately, but it wasn’t terrible either. Bethel finished tenth overall, though this doesn’t tell the full story. We beat plenty of teams from our conference, but we also invited Kansas Colleges that weren’t in our conference. Most of these were community colleges, which are generally cheaper and offer two years courses. These colleges get a lot of international athletes, and can afford to take athletes who might not be able to get good enough grades to allow them to compete in the NAIA. A lot of these runners are very good – as was seen on Saturday. Thankfully Bethel won’t have to compete against them in any important races.

I personally, as well as the team, have to concentrate on getting a bit of consistency in races. This was the third week in a row of hard training and racing, so its possible I was a bit tired, but I still felt as though my race could have been better. It wasn’t as bad as the 5k at McPherson granted, but I wasn’t where I’d like to be. Plenty of guys were in front of me who’d I’d beaten convincingly at the Kansas Wesleyan meet last week. That being said, I think I would have caught some more runners if the race hadn’t been short by a mile. The actual course was fine – we ran it two days before and coach had been checking it almost to the point of obsession – but the lead car managed to take a wrong turn, and I ended up sprinting into the finish way sooner than I thought. In a way it was a blessing, because I wasn’t having a great race, but it was also very frustrating for the team. On top of this, I got spiked. Some guy tried to pass me on the inside at around 4k, so obviously I pushed back, which led to some other guys spikes going into my shin. Who says cross country isn’t a contact sport?

I was featured in the pre - meet advertising. 

I’ve been telling a few of the guys about the Wirral Endurance Squad – needless to say they’re very impressed. I’ve been showing them some of the performances at the BMC and other races, and they can’t believe how fast the kids are. In fairness, I spent three years coaching the squad and I still can’t believe how fast they are. I’m also shocked by how fast the group is growing – we seem to be getting new runners all of the time, which is great. I had a lot of fun catching up on the virtual 5k that the team ran in Birkenhead Park over the weekend. There was some really outstanding times, and the pictures looked fantastic.

The Americans have been introducing me to lots of new things, including American slang, which I won’t go into because I’ll just make myself angry. Suffice to say that they don’t speak the language of Milton and Shakespeare over here. Then again, I’m not sure that we’re that much better in England. The Americans also play a lot of different leisure sports – volleyball is very popular over here. The cross-country team had a match against some of the soccer guys the other night on the beach – volleyball court. Neither team was of a particularly high standard, but I managed to distinguish myself as the worst player by far.

Training continues in its usual style; long run Monday, reps on Tuesday, Medium run Wednesday, Fartlek Thursday, medium run Friday, Race (or run/session depending) Saturday, rest on Sunday. We’ve started going to the athletics gym two to three times a week after running as well. I’ve got to learn all the techniques and whatnot, but I hope that it’ll have some kind of impact long term. Academically things seem to be progressing fairly well. We’re set to have some tests in various classes – I had one in my History of Civilization class today (Monday) which I think went pretty well. There was a lot to get done in 50 minutes, because there were plenty of long answer questions, and an essay to finish it off. The Americans have a curious rule, whereby you can leave the exam hall as soon as you’ve finished – rather than waiting for the allotted time to pass. There were an awful lot of people leaving after about 15 minutes! Either they have super human writing speeds, or else they somehow managed to miss out the essay.