Training Blog: Nick Dahl reflects on a winter vacation abroad and a trip to Yale

Nick Dahl is one of Pennsylvania's top distance runners. The Germantown Friends' School junior blogged about his training during the fall for MileSplit. Now he returns this winter for a journal entry about his indoor campaign for PennTrackXC. Dahl has been busy since finishing up his cross country season, traveling to Vietnam and beyond. He returned to drop a pair of PA#1s (one with a relay and one individually) up at the Yale Track Classic. Dahl takes us through his training from the end of XC until his races at Yale, chronicling the ups and downs along the way. Here's Dahl's first entry of the season for us!

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There's no such thing as bad weather, only improper clothing. A harsh lesson we all learn again as winter begins, when the days get shorter and the runs get colder. This is indoor track season, the time of year where every other type of athlete scurries inside for shelter, sticking to the heated interior of a gymnasium. But not runners. No, we prefer to stick it out on the trails until the bitter end, and when they are no longer an option we move to sidewalks and plowed streets. There's not much to be said behind our motives other than "we'll be faster in the spring" and the lasting knowledge that treadmills just aren't worth it. This is the season that defines the rest of the year through June, and athletes know that eventually, some day in the future, they will be glad they took their gloves off of the heater and braved the elements for an afternoon of intervals. This is the season that leaves toes numb and ankles dry, and fingers so clumsy that they can't untie tight knots on a pair of spikes. This is the season of 200 meter tracks, hairpin turns, and competition so fierce, you'll be begging for the wide open spaces of cross-country by the time next season rolls around, desperate for some space to stretch out your legs.

This is indoor track, and I couldn't be more excited.

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My team, Germantown Friends School, had a long and winding road to make it to our first major week of competition at the Yale Track Classic. Immediately following the end of cross-country season at NXN Northeast, we all took two weeks off, to hit the reset button physiologically. The season had been a great one, but some finished at that last meet with a bad taste in their mouth, myself included, and all we wanted to do was get back to the regularity of training.

The effects of not running were almost immediate, and I could feel this crazy internal need to burn energy without a means to do so. After a week of absolutely no running, we began doing a recovery run every other afternoon, and they became my most covetable moments of the whole day. The efforts were almost cruel in their shortened length, and although I knew that my body really needed the rest to return to full strength, there was nothing I wanted to do more than hit the trails for a few strong miles in a moderate effort. But the time did pass eventually, and before I knew it, we were right back in the swing of things, picking up the work we put down so long ago at the conclusion of last year's track season.

Dahl racing the mile leg of the DMR at Yale (Photo by Steve Mazzone)

And so began the ascent to getting ourselves competition-ready. After months of long workouts, lactate threshold efforts, and 5k race pace pieces, we completely shifted gears, welcoming a wave of anaerobic work to get ourselves ready for shorter, faster races. For me, the hurt that comes from these workouts is an experience far removed from anything that we would feel during the summer and autumn seasons of training. Whereas those workouts would definitely leave me feeling exhausted as well, the parts of my system that start to fall apart first are wildly different. Cross country workouts sneak up on you, with the soreness slowly taking over more and more of your interval until your form becomes sloppy and you fight to get enough oxygen into your lungs to convince your legs that they can continue to churn. The first piece is almost too comfortable, and you don't realize how bad it's going to get until you begin forcing your legs to take on another loop around the grass fields and hills.

Track workouts are entirely different. Right from the start of the first piece, I have a sense of exactly how that last one is going to feel, and I know exactly where it's going to start. My shoulders are usually the first to go, tensing up with a wave of rigidity, and my neck follows closely. It's no longer a battle to pull in enough oxygen, but rather one to muster enough motivation to keep your legs moving at the insane pace you've tasked them with. And there's not really much "warming up into the workout" either, like I could sometimes do with long tempos or lactate threshold work. Either you've got the flexibility/rigidity balance just right, or you're going to have a long day. Yet we all welcomed track season back with open arms, a new warm-up routine, and the grit to take on Mother Nature for the next few months.

Family vacation means some variety in runs, like this one in Phnom Penh

But between me and that first race, there would stand several obstacles. First came winter break, where my family and I went on vacation to the other side of the world, travelling through Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand over two weeks. I knew that getting in my runs while I stayed in unfamiliar places would be a challenge, but it was one that I was incredibly excited to take on.

We started the break in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), the capital city of Vietnam. We found it was overrun daily by a wave of bikers and motorcycles, so I knew that if I had any chance of completing my runs on pace, it would have to be early in the morning, before the city even woke up. I found the largest public park, mere blocks from the small hotel we were staying in, and I did all of my runs there, circling the few available blocks not absolutely crushed by pedestrians and vehicles. It was a gorgeous way to get my miles in, and although I didn't have many choices as to where I could go, the scenery and people around me changed every day and kept it interesting.



Cambodia's Royal Palace in the capital city

One morning, after I had done my running, I jumped into a public dancing class at 7:00am (picture hundreds of people all following an instructor with a large speaker), and despite not knowing a word of Vietnamese, I had a great time jazzercising to the rhythm. The next morning, again after I had finished my miles, I joined a legion of old ladies all practicing their fan routine under the shade of the royal palace. While my sweaty, neon running outfit wasn't quite what they were dressed in, I was welcomed among their ranks for the morning.


(Left) Watching the sun come over the temple as I ran around Angkor Wat; (Right) Climbing through a temple being reclaimed by nature

Next on my family's itinerary was Cambodia, travelling between both Phnom Penh, the capital city, and Siem Reap, the city directly next to Angkor Wat. Again, it was just me, my GPS watch, and whatever map I could get my hands on in the mornings before the city would wake up, navigating foreign streets covered in signs I couldn't read and people I couldn't understand.


Thailand's Summer Palace

The story was no different once we arrived in Bangkok, the final city we would stay in. A glass of bad water and a stomach virus bad enough to knock my weight down a few pounds kept me out of commission for two days, but those would prove to be the only casualties of the vacation, and my training stayed as strong as ever in the 95 degree weather before we came back to Philadelphia on January 1st. There's no better way to spend New Year's Eve than flying backwards through 12 different time zones, experiencing midnight again and again every hour as we made our way around the globe and back home.


Now, the team regrouped and took on two full weeks of training for the big weekend of competition. Our school, Germantown Friends, does something unique, in which every junior is given the month of January to pursue an internship off-campus for four weeks. I chose to spend mine here in Philadelphia, at a company called Invisible Sentinel. While this new experience was a great way for me to learn more, it also meant that I would be doing a lot more runs on my own, out in the cold, either before the day began way early in the morning, or in the evening after work finished. Neither choice was ideal, but I made it work, combining morning and night runs to get everything done.


The one workout from these two weeks that really stuck with me was a set of 8x400 on January 5th, progressively getting faster and faster with the same time of recovery as I descended from 1600 race pace to 800 race pace. My job had taken me way late into the night, and I got out long after the sun had set, so I jogged over to the Franklin Field track, laced up my spikes under the few floodlights that were still on, and began the work. After opening up in 63.4 and 62.0 for my first two, I could already see the steam rising off of my head in the cold wintery night. The setting was almost surreal for me, looking around at the empty stadium seats which only a few months ago I had seen packed to the brim with screaming fans at Penn Relays. Now, where tens of thousands of athletes and spectators had been stood were just empty bleachers. My remaining next six pieces went over well, and I split 61.7, 60.5, 60.0, 60.0, 58.9, and 58.4 to close out the night. My hands were too cold to untie my spikes once I got back to my sports bag, so I jogged around, shaking them out until I could get my shoes off of my feet. Whenever I could, I would take the train to school to join the rest of my teammates in a run, but they were rare opportunities.


Franklin Field in the evening

Finally, we made it to the weekend of Yale. From what I had heard and seen, the team had built an incredible energy leading into the evening, and I could tell right from the first day that we were going to do some cool things. First up came the Boy's DMR on Friday evening. After a brisk warm-up in the New Haven air, we got onto the track for the Championship section, energized and ready to go. Grayson Hepp took the line as our lead-off leg, but right after the gun went off, a stray elbow caught our baton and knocked it to the ground. Grayson looked around, expecting a restart from the officials, but once it became clear he wasn't going to get one, he picked up the baton and started off towards the pack, already careening around the bend about 50 meters ahead of us. His race immediately following the initial misstep was one of the gutsiest performances I've ever seen, and over the course of all 6 of his laps he diminished the lead, handing off to Eli Schwemler right on the back of the pack.

Eli took it out hard and came back even harder, keeping us in the race and in contention to make it on the medal stand. Jonnie Plass was our next leg, and within the first 100 meters of the race, he had already overtaken two other teams. He hung onto that lead for three laps, opening his race in a 55 second first half, but the initial speed eventually caught up to him, and he gave it to me once again in last place.

Jonnie Plass running the 800 leg of the DMR at Yale (Photo by Steve Mazzone)

The field was laid out in front of me, so I took the baton from him and got racing. For the first two laps I closed the gap and then sat on Henderson's anchor runner Spencer Smucker, who carried me through the first 800 meters in a blistering 2:04 split. He began to fade, and I saw my final opportunity to stay engaged in the race, so I broke ahead and began reeling in the rest of the field one by one. With two laps to go, I found myself sitting just off of the shoulder of the 3rd place guy. I started my kick, and by the time the bell lap concluded, I had pulled into a 2nd place finish with an individual time of 4:14.5 and a team time of 10:31.34, the top mark in Pennsylvania and #7 in the nation, despite a dropped baton.
Grayson Hepp runs a PA#2 800 meters at Yale (Photo by Lisa Romanchick)

The next day, we came back to the track, finding exactly as much success in our second day of competition. We were all still feeling the previous day's races, but that didn't stop us from running some of the fastest times in the nation. I ran a hard-fought 3,000m race against some of the nation's finest, finishing in a US #8 time of 8:39.71, but the true heroes of the day were our shorter distance athletes. Sarah Walker took home the meet win in a US #2 time of 2:12.21, and Grayson Hepp ran a lifetime best and school record of 1:55.50, which earned with #2 in PA and #8 in the nation as well (he was second in the meet). To cap it all off, we ran another school record time in the 4x400 of 3:31.64 later that evening, an exclamation point on the sentence of our weekend performance. We went home, victorious, celebrating the great start to our season and excited for everything that there is still to come.

On the girls' side for GFS, Sarah Walker cruised to victory in the 800 meters (Photo by Lisa Romanchick)