We're only two practices in, and my usual 1/2 runners are typically kind of slow starters when it comes to early season workouts, and the kid in question showed up ready to pounce on them. We had a pretty nasty storm during yesterday's workout, so we kept it short - a bunch of 500m repeats on short rest. I was pleased with how badly he worked the rest of the team, but wasn't ready to ready that much into it because he's so on-record about preferring short stuff that maybe beating up on some distance runners in the shortest reps we'll do all year isn't that big a deal.

But today we did 4 x 1.5 mile repeats and it was just rude what he did to everybody. Just routinely finishing 10-20 seconds up on the next closest runners. The 1.5 miles was spread over two loops, and on the last repeat there was another kid (a swimmer, very strong - not very fast at anything below two miles, definitely a type) who had put a little bit of space on him during the first loop. I did my usual "close up that gap" attempt to get them to run together, but by the time they came back around he'd caught the front runner and, again, put about 100m on him.

Afterwards, he joined up for a looooooong cooldown with our #2 runner, who favors fairly rigorous cooldowns. And then added his own on the track, finishing with a mile of jog-the-curves-and-stride-the-straight all by himself.

This is, at the very least, extremely encouraging. If the updates continue to be good and I'm not lazy, I'll be back with more. Plus, the chance that in two months this conversation will be "how do I convince a kid to give up the sport he really loves (basketball)". Selling kids on track is one of my least favorite things to do, but if he runs under 16:00 this XC season then there's a real chance of him dropping something in the <1:55 and <4:20 range this outdoor season, which would set him up to get a bit of college attention his senior year.