Wow what a great meet on Saturday! Thank you parents for helping so much. A special thank you goes out to our setup / clean up crew and our Rabbits!! You make the meet run so smooth. Coach Jeremy rode over 20 miles! Our timers Alan and Tom are rock stars too!

This week we will be at really fun course at Palona Vista Park in Palmdale. This meet will be a lot smaller and we look forward to seeing mainly just our VYC teams, plus the Kern County team. We will be combining some of the boys and girl races. Its a great chance to get a better place in the race.

If you ordered merchandise from our online store it should be in by Thursday, and you can pick it up at practice !

Race Results and Schedule  

You can see all results and upcoming meets on our website, just click on the cross country link! Results can also be found there and on vyc-xc.org Please check out and like our Facebook page, Storm Cross Country for some great picture from Anthony Calderon. He will have a link to download them soon!! 

JELLY BEANS- We have enough for now Please bring any you have already picked up and if you have a scoop from us please return that too.

The scoops we use are from baby formula so if you have any of those we would appreciate you giving us your left overs. 

Practice Week of Sept 18th -Sept. 23rd 

Monday - West Creek Park 6:00 -7:15 (last practice here)

Tuesday - Central Park at 6:00 -7:15 pm -  

Thursday Central Park 6:00 - 7:15 pm -

Saturday - 7:30 am - Meet at Palona Vista Park, Palmdale

Race Schedule - All times are approximate, with a rolling start - races may over-lap. Some of the races, the girls and boys will run together

7:45- 8:30 -self guided course preview 

8:00 Coaches meeting near the start line 

8:30 SUB-GREMLIN and GREMLINS GIRL AND BOYS MAY RUN TOGETHER

8:45 - BANTAM GIRLS - 9/10

9:00 BANTAM BOYS – 9/10

9:20 JUNIOR GIRLS – 11/12

9:45 JUNIOR BOYS – 11/12

10:10- YOUTH GIRLS – 13/14 &15-18- AND YOUTH BOYS – 13/14 &15-18 will run together

This is a rolling time schedule and can change at the meet. Please arrive early!!

Coach Jeremy's Notes to the Team 

Athletes, Parents, Coaches, and all other supportive family and friends,

If you were there Saturday, you got to enjoy a big-time cross-country meet at our home course! We had some of the largest races we’ve ever seen and that includes what coaches could remember who’ve been around for over 30 years!

Our athletes did great and I hope each of you enjoyed racing in such a high caliber field.

For me, I always like to race, to compete, to challenge myself, and to show everyone around the results of training hard. I realize that not all of you completely embrace that same mentality and that is ok. Ultimately though running and racing is all about challenging yourself to be better. You are the ONLY judge on if you did that, and you also are the ONLY one with the power to change that. 

My greatest responsibility, and that of the other coaches as well, is not to produce national champions. It’s not to produce age group champions. It is to produce athletes, young kids, who challenge themselves to be better every day. For some that means you will be top 8 in our conference. For others it means you pushed harder then ever, and beat more of your competition to crack into the top 50, or 30, or maybe 100. The key to remember is YOU are the only one that can make the decision to push through what you thought was your ceiling. 

So onto this week:

1. We are going to finish West Creek up with Movie Hill tonight! Boom!
2. Then we’ll enjoy the “Stairway to Heaven” on Tuesday!
3. Then we’ll get into speed on Thursday with Half-Mile Loop repeats!

So… what are you willing to do this week? How hard are you willing to work? At the end of the day, you show up and we practice at 6pm, and we are finished by 7:15 or 7:30. You are out there for 1-1.5 hours regardless if you take it easy or work hard! As you drive home at 7:30 you can either say, I killed that practice, or… you can say I “could” have killed that practice. The only difference is a little more suffering along the way….

If you didn’t know, the Prefontaine Classic was last weekend. It doubled as the Diamond League world finals as well. So… all of the best track athletes in the world again descended on Hayward Field in Eugene Oregon.

Gudaf Tsegay is a female world champion 5k/10k specialist from Ethiopia. An amazing runner to watch compete. The 5k women’s race Sunday was stacked with talent and as it unfolded there were 2 runners competing to break the world record. Some athletes show up to race, while others show up to try to steal the glory. Beatrice Chebet from Kenya was the latter and as the race a little more than half-way Tsegay was looking to Chebet to help carry some pace load but Chebet wasn’t having any of it and just sat on her heals. After a couple laps of that, leading to them falling off world record pace, Tsegay decided it was time to do it alone and took off with just a few laps remaining. As you watch the world record time, she first caught up to the pace, then with every step began to pull more and more ahead of the pace. Tsegay won while smashing the record by almost 5 seconds running 14:00.21. A female, almost breaking 14 min for a 5k!! 

Why was this so impressive to me? We train really hard, we train very purposefully, and we do so with 1 goal: when you step into a race, you can be confident in your ability to drop the hammer when you want to, kick harder than your competition, and always find one more gear. Tsegay could have mentally given up when Chebet decided to just sit on her. Or… as she did, she could say: I’ve trained for this, I’m the strongest, and I’m going to show her that was a mistake… Oh yeah, and go on to become the most amazing female 5k runner in the history of the world.

So… this week, go get your piece of the action, go challenge yourself more than you ever have before. If you are the best, be even better. If you are in the middle, knock off more of your competition. If you are towards the back, knock off more of your competition also! No matter where you are in the field, you can always improve!

Alright, that’s it for now. See you tonight!

Coach Jeremy