Morning practice

One of the beauties of winter intersession is the ability to practice at any time of the day. The young and current Marist Running Red Foxes may not agree with this assessment, but their old coach does.

In an effort to squeeze an indoor workout in today before setup for tonight's big women's basketball game vs. Iona, we called a 7:15 practice. That's a.m., for those keeping score at home.

And for college students on their winter holiday break, 7:15 a.m. is beyond early. After all, most college students (men, at the very least) are spending their days and nights engaged in the very important activities of playing video games, watching football and sleeping. Especially, sleeping. And so, a 7:15 a.m. practice, and a hard workout to boot, did not go over well.

Based on what my eyes witnessed this morning, though, the boys apparently did some training in between holiday meals, parties, video games and football. A very nice welcome-back-to-Poughkeepsie-and-the-McCann-Center effort this morning, boys!

For those that are interested ...

The majority of the guys in attendance did a turnover-type workout to get them ready for the turnover they will do in the workout-style meet we have Friday at the Armory. No need to shock their systems into racing on race day. This workout was literally an early-morning wakeup call:

3 sets of: 400 meters hard (60-66 for most), short jog recovery (30 seconds), 200 meters hard (27-31 for most), short jog recovery (30 seconds), 200 meters hard (same). Full recovery. Repeat twice. Long warmup. Long cooldown. Double later. Not a bad day's work in between video games, eating and sleeping.

A few of the longer distance boys did: 2x1k at 2:57-3:03; 1x800 at 2:19-2:22; 1x400 at 66-67.

As we always do, we started the workout with a "stride" 400. Today's "stride" 400 was comical. Judging by the half-asleep body language, I joked that I could have done the stride with them. As it turns out, I probably could have made it for at least 200 meters of their pathetic, 82-second shuffle.

But alas, it did seem to wake them up into a worthwhile morning workout, which no doubt was followed by a lengthy mid-morning nap.