It’s been awhile! As you can probably tell, blog posting time is really hard to come by at Holderness. A lot has happened in the two-plus weeks that I haven’t posted, so I’ll give a brief overview:

This week, the first week of our senior year, has been absolutely jam-packed. Homework assignments are flying left and right, and we have our first cross country race on Wednesday. The time-trial went well, I finished with a time of 19:22, which is almost :30 better than last year, and only :30 off of the big Lithuanian Vytautas’s time from last year. Our first race this year is at home, and is a small meet, which should be a crowd-pleaser because Holderness can typically place really well in the three-school meets.

I’m currently sitting in Plymouth, NH, unpacked, decompressed, organized, and psyched! I’ve arrived with some of my fellow seniors(wow!!) for leadership training and to take the new students on orientation hike. Campus is a little different than last year…most noticably so in the newly redone Weld Hall dining room.

As the funny AT&T commercials say: “I have found the internet!” It was hiding in the Block Island Library and I had to go seek it out to be able to post to FasterSkier again.

The summer is almost over! I have one last week of vacation, and I’ve already finished my summer job. My first Holderness CC race of the year is in about a month, and I don’t quite know yet how I’ll fill graduated Lithuanian senior Vytautas’s shoes. (short 2008 scouting report below)

The BNSC group gathered at Torrey Woods Road once again to do some quality level 4 intervals. Patrick and I also had to do the 200m sprint and 1k time trial, since we both missed the day when the rest of the group tested these things.

Yesterday’s activities: an hour run and a full 3 sets of the Steamboat Core Workout. It’s so amazing how far we’ve come, from barely being able to do one of those core sets to being able to do all three. They are never easy, but what is easy in Nordic training?

Today my dad and I went to Dick’s Sporting Goods to scope out some running shoes for the season. Here is a picture of what we got. The white ones are training shoes, and the black/red ones are more like trail running flats, which I will use for racing.

I decided to try out my training shoes on the road today, and they were extremely comfortable. I went about 7 miles and felt amazing all the way. It took exactly one hour from start to finish. Here is the Google Maps route of what I did. I hope to run more toward the end of the week. Expect some more media clips and stuff of that. (I sent my GPS off to Garmin the other day, but I’m not sure when it will be back.)

Ian

Yesterday we might have had one of the smallest groups show up for training yet. A lot of people are away for these last few weeks of summer. Last night though, the lack of attendance did not mean there was a lack of quality. We tried a workout that we hadn’t done yet this year, the 4 minute level 4 skate intervals. We met at route 2 and warmed up for almost 40 minutes, mixing in some leg speeds and technique. Then we did a two minute level 3 interval to get warmed up.

The excel spreadsheet doesn’t lie! I’ve reached my goal of 100 hours for the summer. Now I’m working on cutting down the volume dramatically and getting more running hours in to prepare for the racing season. My base hours have been established and now I’m transitioning, two things that I didn’t do well last summer. I feel so much more fit and ready than last year.