Tonight was the first practice of the year for the youth team I coach, the Bremerton Jaguars. The philosophy this year is that for the first three weeks, at least, we do nothing but conditioning. Let the kids whine. We broke into groups of five (we have 35 on the team now, which should grow to between 50-75) and did workouts of 5 minutes running broken up by short sprints (a set of 50m, then a faster set of 25m, then running stairs). It was fun to get started, and actually there wasn't too much whining. So when we finished I put in four miles around the track. A few kids jumped in with me for a lap, but every one of them got gassed quickly at 7/min-ish pace. I'm going to keep doing post-practice workouts in front of the kids, hoping some of the better ones (who have plenty of energy left, I think) get pulled in more often for a mile or two. supernova glide -- 168
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