After a relative lull around Christmas, the past month has been used to further lay the groundwork for the upcoming summer season. The next building block in the foundation has been laid. As trainers, we assume that you need to build a good foundation before moving to specific and harder workouts. This means that especially the endurance runs should be run very slowly.
For that building the foundation, you have to have a lot of patience. It is a matter of years and years to build this solidly. For athletes, especially younger ones, this is often a difficult process. They want to move forward! And think that hard training is needed to become faster. But that very fact that training too early, too much and too hard is disastrous for long-term development. By repeatedly explaining why workouts are specified at a certain pace, athletes do understand what it’s all about:
not maximum, but optimal training!
That it pays to train especially not too hard is once again evidenced by the great results achieved by our athletes in the month of January. Despite this not being a competition period for us, there were still 27 participations in competitions. In it, 12 podium finishes were achieved: 8x place 1, 3x place 2 and 1x place 3. Also, 7 PRs and 4 Club records have already been run.
All achievements are great, of course, but in this case there is 1 achievement that stands out. Max Hutjens became Dutch Champion in the 1500m indoor in the Boys U16 (formerly C-juniors) in 4:25.44. With that, he won sovereignly with a 3-second lead.
Next month more Dutch Championships are scheduled for our athletes: NK indoor Juniors, NK indoor Seniors, NK 10km on the road and NK Cross.
Sprinting to the next one!
Trainer Bob
