CAMP!

Hello again!

Back from my whirlwind trip to Montreal and right back to the throws of high school cross country camp!  Luckily, I had three awesome camp coaches to take the reigns while I was gone. Nikki Swenson, Matt Gabrielson and Jamie Piepenburg deserve all the credit for a great week of camp!!!

We had a "huge" group compared to previous years and that made it even more fun!  55 distance runners in total made for lots of great training groups, good lectures with insightful questions and LOTS OF LAUGHS!  Not only were they great runners, but they did a pretty good job with Gopher Olympics as well :):)  Special thanks to the team from Canby for bringing down a big groups as well as the group from St. Anthony. They are both going to have successful seasons ahead of them!

For those of you future coaches out there, building up a camp from scratch has been a challenge that seems to finally be paying off. It takes a lot of years with smaller groups before it can become a destination that is on everyones radar. The biggest group we had before this year was 26. One thing we finally did this year was to involve more high school coaches, which was not only great for us, but I think will help the camp continue to grow. Thanks again to Matt Gabrielson from Edina HS as well as Patti Percival from White Bear Lake for their help. It was also great to have Travis from St. Anthony accompany his team for two days. I hope this is something that more coaches take advantage of in the future! 

I also had the pleasure of speaking to the Minnesota High School Cross Country Coaches Association on Tuesday. At these events I am reminded of how lucky I am to get to recruit in a state that has such wonderful coaches. I hope that they took a few take home points away from the talk and didn't get too bored!

A few days of deep cleansing breaths before heading Mitchell, SD to speak at a high school camp and then to the USATF JO meet in Greensboro, NC next week!  Oh yea...then I guess I will get married when I get back :)

Gotta Run!

Hop

P.S. A big shout out to Brookdale Volkswagen for my new wheels :)  I will be cruising around in style with my new black VW Jetta!