Finally, a good practice

With some students always on work program and now with several out with injuries or some kind of malady, the daily attendance is always a constant 6 or 7. And I'm learning to live with that. Today we finally had a good practice with seven runners with only one hiccup. One of the boys has been having pain in his legs and it finally got too bad today, so I shut him down indefinitely like I did the girl runner on Saturday.

Other than that, the remaining 6 ran the opening 2.1 loop quite well. Two of the runners got PBs (personal bests) for the distance. And then we had a mini intra squad meet. It would be their first exposure to how a meet works, so I mapped out a course of only about 1/2 mile so that I knew that they would be able to run the whole race without stopping and be able to attain some speed as well.

I tried to split the teams up so that they would be as equal as possible. I had three boys and three girls. I was off by a little because one of the girls who I expected to finish strong got stitches and finished 6th. As a result the race was as close as it could possibly be: Team B beat Team A by a score of 10-11.

Yesterday I thought I finally had the roster at a constant, but the one girl who quit is coming back and another girl who has been taking forever to get her "papers" in order has finally done so. So there are now 9 girls, with maybe another one to join later in the week--she talked to me today before practice. And there are two more boys joining--one of whom ran in today's practice/meet. He shows some raw talent and now I have what looks like three strong male runners. This program in the beginning gave the impression that it would be a girls team, but now it's starting to look more like a strong boys team.

One week to race number ONE.