Coach McEnroe Saves the Day

Hi all,

Firstly I have to start by commenting on the bizarre start to the day. I have still been hunting for a good standard track on which to torture (I mean scientifically train of course) the players and it has been tough. That is until this morning when I approached a local high school that had a proper rubberised track and asked if I could use it with our team. I was getting a rather vague reaction until fate smiled on me and the athletics coach happened to walk in and after a brief introduction offered us full use of his facilities…and his name…Coach McEnroe! No joke, Coach McEnroe and a distant cousin of the legend himself no less. Now of course this HAD to be a good day.

Unfortunately my excitement of finding a good track and also happening across Coach McEnroe was not quite matched by the players who knew full well that the next 90 minutes was not going to be pleasant. And after the 8th 400 metre sprint of the required 12 their fears were fairly justified. For any of you who haven’t had the pleasure of running a 400 metre sprint it pretty much the nastiest distance ever created, its just far enough to sprint and just short enough not to be able to pace it, therefore what you get is a leg, lung and mind bursting training distance which would test any elite athlete but that will also eventually make you so strong that a 5 set match would be physically easy. This is the idea anyway!

To their credit all of the players completed the session and Anna and Oscar both improved on their fastest times and even though they weren’t able to maintain their times it is a good improvement. To make the session even more interesting (if that’s actually possible) we were also joined again by senior British player Sarah Borwell, who really encourages the younger players and even a cameo appearance on the track by our Head Coach Dave, complete with his usual strong words of wisdom and slightly heavy footed running style.

Obviously the training day would not be complete without a couple hours of lifting in the gym followed by obligatory end of day ice baths which everyone loves so much and then another day is done and another brick in the wall is laid.

Thanks to you all for following our progress,

Jez