Hey! I’m Ace Brown. I will be a senior this year at Fort Myers High School. As a junior, I finished 11th in the state for cross-country. I’ve been presented with the fine honor of sharing my running experiences from southwest Florida with everyone here on Flrunners. I can’t wait to see how it goes.
As a team, we are led by the fearless coach Yancey Palmer. Since my freshman year at Fort Myers, our boys cross team has done nothing but improve as a whole. We have remained a young team for the past few years, but this year, we have an older base, and from what I can tell, we could very well have a chance to compete with the best in the state. We have been training all summer and have been working to build a strong TEAM foundation for the start of the season. One way we work with team bonding is through a team camp hosted by Coach Palmer’s parents in Blairsville, Georgia. They have a cabin in the mountains where we stay at night. Some of the guys (including myself) sleep in the woodshop/garage just up a little wooded trail from the cabin and some stay inside the cabin. We ran doubles on most days and ran one race. Some of our greatest triumphs were running 3.5 to 4 miles up and back down the dreaded “blood mountain” (yes…that is the real name), and running the “Green Bean Festival 5k Race”. We were gone for one week in total…MORE than enough for us Florida “flatlanders”.
Every year for the past five years, I have attended a cross country camp at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It is a week long camp focused on learning about running, and what running is like at the college level. I have had the chance to run with world class athletes such as Chris Solinsky, Matt Tegenkamp, and most recently, the NCAA cross country champion and Olympic competitor in the 10,000m Mohammed Ahmed. In addition, I have trained under guidance from the Nike track team coach Jerry Shumacher, UW head Track and Field coach Ed Nuttycomb, and UW head cross-country coach Mick Byrne.
My biggest goals for this upcoming season are to keep training as hard, and smart as I can, and to just keep improving. With those two goals, I hope to be up to par to compete with the best in the state.
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