786 Miles.   Every year I take my distance crew to Florida for some warm weather training and team building.  This year I am not teaching at STM so I have a different spring break than my runners.  I have half my team in Panama City Beach Florida and the other half spread out elsewhere.  A couple guys are actually in Champaign.  Training the guys for the ITT from 786 miles away has been relatively easy.  They have the two workouts to get in and with text messages and email we have stayed in pretty good contact.  Although I am missing a lot of the team building stuff, I am current with the training.  We have a very strong team environment, these trips help keep our team close to one another.  They have had the luxury of running on the sandy crushed gravel country roads of the PanHandle and doing 400's on a nice grassy surface.  I wonder if it was as muddy as our 400 loop at STM?

They are planning on traveling back on Thursday and being ready to run on Friday at ITT at Illinois Weslynn.  Our 4 x 800 relay is looking to running well and Brendan Remington will be runnign the 3200 meters.  Each of the 4 relay team will be also running and individual event, Sam Powers wants to run both the 800 and 1600.  Not overly keen on that but try and let my runners make some of their running decisions.  I did not put Nick Hess or any of the 4 x 800 team in the 3200 so we could be fresh for it.