Cross Country Update: Trevor Sytsma
10/12/2015 8:55:00 AM | Cross Country, Competing With Purpose Blog
Freshman Trevor Sytsma of the men's cross country team checks back in as the Waves grow closer to the championship part of their season:
33 days. 792 hours. 47,520 minutes. 2,851,200 seconds. That's all the time we have left before this cross country season comes to a close with the NCAA West Regional Championships in Seattle on November 13. Over the course of those 2,851,200 seconds, it's our goal to mentally and physically prepare ourselves as much as possible to run blazing fast 10Ks.
However,as important as it is for each of us to run well as individuals in Seattle, our success will really depend on how well we can run as a whole. Let me explain what I mean by that:
In cross country, the top five runners on each team are the main contributors to the team's overall score. The team score is the sum of the top five runners' individual places, with the lowest overall sum winning the meet title. Runners six and seven can potentially have an impact on overall scores as well, but I won't eat up your precious time (and my precious word count) explaining that here. Â Â
In our current situation, we have a really solid front-four pack. Freshman Nick Heath, sophomore Kevin Maeda, and juniors Ben Fox and Nick Blanchard have consistently been our top four runners in every race this season. But after them, we have a bit of a gap to runner number five.
An old cross country saying goes, "you're only as strong as your fifth runner."While I've always found this to be a slight piece of athletic hyperbole (I mean, you can have an amazing top four and still be pretty darn successful),there is, admittedly, some truth to it. If we're going to run our best race as a whole team, we need to close that gap as much as possible and get a fifth runner, and ideally even a sixth and seventh runner, up there with number four.
Fortunately we have quite the selection of guys who are capable of filling those roles. Like everyone else on the team, I want to be one of them. Spending time thinking about what I need to do to get there, I've thought back to a word Coach Radnoti shared at one of this summer's running camps for which I was counselor: "kaizen."
"Kaizen"is a Japanese word simply meaning "improvement." However, as Coach Radnoti told us, in the Japanese workforce "kaizen" has come to describe the process of not just improvement, but of continual improvement - of breaking up a task into its constituent pieces and aiming to improve in each of those small areas individually over time. Applied to athletics,"kaizen" is all about consciously focusing on one little aspect of performance each day and striving to improve in that aspect as much as possible. Theoretically,the sum of a lot of little improvements in a lot of little areas is overall better performance. Just like in a car, the better the parts, the better the whole.
This is a valuable piece of wisdom for not only Pepperdine's athletic teams, but for anyone aspiring for self-betterment. And it's a piece of wisdom several of my teammates and I try to focus on every day. Before every practice or run, I think to myself, "okay, during this workout I'm going to focus on maintaining good running form even when I'm tired," or "during this run I'm going to concentrate on running downhills with better control," or "during weights today I'm going to make sure my squatting form is as good as Torin's." After all,it's much more practical and manageable to chase after a series of pointed objectives than some big, lofty goal. Â
And while 2,851,200 seconds doesn't seem like much time for the remainder of a season, it's still 2,851,200 seconds I can take full advantage of to assure that I'll be in peak state for championship season.
Players Mentioned
