Phil Duncan is one of the top runners in the state this year. He followed up a great track season with a breakthrough year thus far in cross country, including a 15:25 PR at the flrunners.com Invitational. He has been through some highs and lows in his career including breaking his body with 80 mile weeks. But through his struggles he has learned patience and that each workout has a purpose. We'll take the journey with him through the remainder of this season with this weekly feature.
The second edition of the weekly journal by Boone distance star Phil Duncan on his journey through his senior cross country season.
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Hello all,
It’s Phil Duncan here again. Overall, I thought last week went very well and is a good stepping stone as we enter the postseason. We don’t do anything super-secret in our training and I believe the magic is in the runner, not the training, so I’m pretty open about what I do. I’ll give you guys a brief recap of how my week went:
Monday- 60 minute run with JL.
Tuesday- Baseball field workout. We start at the right outfield corner and run along the fence to home plate. There is not much soft running surfaces in our area so it feels to get some barefoot ~250m repeats in. We do sets of five and start with 60 seconds rest then go down to 45, 30, and then 15. It ends with a home plate- to- home plate.
Wednesday- 65 minute run with JL.
Thursday- Fartlek. After a warm up, we did 4 miles of one minute tempo with two minutes at steady state. JL and then did twenty minutes of steady state and then strides. It wasn’t a killer workout, more comfortably hard.
Friday- 30 minutes with JL.
Saturday- Hagerty Invitational. My plan was to go out in 10:00 and extremely comfortable for two miles and drop a fast last mile. I was out in 5:02 and was out front by a bit and not feeling extremely at ease like I planned. The guys I thought that would be with me were about 10-15 meters back, so when I got to the woods, I tried to open it up a little bit but I was just not feeling it. Eduardo pulled up next to me a halfway through the second mile and we pushed hard for the rest of that loop (10:00/01) and the next. I knew I wasn’t feeling great and Eduardo seemed to be pushing little by little to get some ground. I did my best to relax, stay with him, and be ready to shift into the next gear. But with 700-800m to go, he made a huge move and put 10-15 meters on me in an extremely short period of time. I tried to pull together, but my legs did not respond like they do when I’m “on”. It was a marked improvement from my previous races, but I could feel the last feel the last three weeks of hard work. I negative split every mile and ran 15:26 on I day I did not feel good at all, so I’m pretty happy about the result. JL felt a lot better and finished right with the Trinity Prep top 3, which is a great sign for his recovery.
Sunday- 90 minutes with JL, a tad over 13 miles. 63 miles for the week.
So now it’s time for the post-season! I will be not keying on East Metro (the race is split this year) and districts as I will be on team pacing duties, but I will be training hard and getting ready for the big races. I’m really excited to see how states plays out as there will be no shortage of competition and it is sure to be an awesome race. I’m equally excited about the rest that comes along with the end of the season. Also, it crazy if we think about how there went from being no Florida boys to make Footlocker to now, where there are at least 6 or 7 with a legitimate chance to make it with a good race.
Until Next Week,
Phil
