Athletics Northwest Distance Clinic

I had another interesting weekend spending Friday evening with Adam Goucher and Alberto Salazar and then all day Saturday with Marcus O’Sullivan. It’s true that I had to share them with about 100 other coaches, but who’s counting. I did get to have a few words with Adam and Alberto. On Friday evening they passed me as they left, and I said, “Nice job”. And they responded, “Thanks”.
I had dinner with Marcus. Well technically he was at the table next to me and I listened in to the conversation. It was a good conversation which had nothing to do with track or running.
You have to be impressed by a man like Marcus, four time Olympian, broke four minutes in the mile over 100 times, and ran 26 seasons without injury. What impressed me the most though was how well he explained tempo runs and threshold runs. I have read many articles about this topic, but he explained it in a way that I felt could be adapted to high school athletes.
Another speaker (Dr. Whittaker) spoke about nutrition and left most of us saying - Huh? I gleaned this from the talk: Have a recovery drink with you at practice, so you can use it right away after a tough workout. If you wait until you get home you have missed a window of opportunity. The drink needs to contain these amino acids - leucine, isoleucine and valine. Huh? Try this: He listed a number of drinks and Endurax was the best drink for post workouts and Optimizer was the best for post race according to the ingredients on the label.
Louie Quintana the coach at Arizona State University presented an overview of his program. They start practice at 4:50 in the morning to avoid the heat. I liked his coaching philosophy and it might be worth getting up that early to be a part of his program. I thought it was interesting that he required each athlete to get a blood test for iron before the season began.
I’ll share more later after I go over my notes and handouts.