Andrew Rummens

AM - Did 6 miles in the morning with the team

PM - Did 5 miles at the workout, easy

AM - Woke up at 5:30 this morning to do mile repeats... did a 3 mile warmup to the cross country course and then did some dyamics and strideouts. Spence didn't tell us how many we were gonna do so we were forced to be conservative. The course started up a hill for 400m and looped down to make 850m, so we did about 1.75 loop to make a mile. It was a hard course. We hit 5:55 (super slow) 5:30, 5:32, 5:25, 5:15, 5:10, 5:07. They all went really well. I was dead during classes today though.

AM - Woke up at 8:00 so I got a good night's sleep last night (finally)... went on a 7 mile run

PM - 4 easy miles at practice

AM - 4 easy miles

PM - Mile run to the stadium, dynamics, another 2 mile warmup, then ran the 4 mile course with 5x90 second pushes, then did a mile cooldown... course seems pretty difficult, lots of hills. But I am excited!

AM - 7 easy

First race of the season! It went really good, I held up a lot better for a 4 mile race than I thought I would. It was only us and Westminster, so Coach Spence told us to treat this as a glorified tempo, but it still ended up being a really good effort. He set us up into groups before the race and wanted us working off each other, so that was really helpful. I was in the 2nd group with Kody, Mitch, Jon, Kaden, and Dylan. We were supposed to do the first 2 miles in 5:15-5:20.

Gun went off and we got off to a great start, considering there were only two teams and it was a huge line. I spent the first 800m just settling and and looking around for my group. We worked together and took it pretty easy. The effort felt really good, and we went through our mile in 4:56... 

2nd mile climbed up the back field, but the first loop up wasnt too bad. When we looped around the dirt pasture we lost a few guys right when we hit the 2nd mile split, 10:15. I was suprised because we didn't increase our effort but we didn't fall off to far from our pace.

3rd mile Kaden started pushing it a lot, and so Kody, Jon and I went with him. He led our pack for about a half of a mile before he started to fall off, so I took the leading job from him. I don't usually like leading, but since it was a joint effort, I wasn't too bummed. As we started to climb up the 2 loops again I started to fall off Kody and Jon... I am not sure what our 3 mile split was but it had to be around 15:30-15:40.

When we hit the downhill Kody and Jon had like 5-10 seconds or so on me, and I tried making it up too quickly. By the time we hit the final 300m or so on the grass I didn't have much left. I could have kicked it in, but I don't think I could have caught them, only catch them or be off my a second or so. Regardless, I still finished just 5 seconds behind them, so I'm not too bummed. 

Fun seeing everybody out to come cheer us on! A lot of people from USU woke up early to come watch us, so that was fantastic. My family also came up from Bountiful, so that was super cool. It is going to be a great season!