The camping trip is going fast, everyone is having fun and keeping busy!  We have had team building exercises, kickball games, and camp fire talks.  Around the campfire we have talked about our individual goals, team goals, how to act positively as a team member and what we want to be when we grow up!  Today we had our annual Frisbee football tournament, Paul's Bunion won, a team of Camron, Lexi, Richie, Jordyn, and Sophie! 

Tonight everyone is excited for our night out.  The girls are putting on dresses, the boys hopefully are combing their hair for our night out of pizza and a movie.  Friday will be our final day with the run around lake Bemidji!

The first two days of the camping trip are going great! The runners have been doing a great job of cooking and cleaning up after meals.  We started our first run on Monday with a big challenge, Bemidji Ballbusters. This working out is running two minutes hard and then two minutes easy over a one mile loop in the state park that has very large steep hills on it.  To qualify as a "ballbuster" you need to complete 12 two minute hard runs, which comes to 48 minutes of running.  We had a huge group of boys and girls reach that mark.  Camron and Leif (in picture) ran 16 two minute runs to reach the highest total this year. 

Monday night we had our traditional campfire with smores and team building talk.  The subject was "share a time when a teammate has helped you through a difficult time."  It was great to hear how much the runners have helped each other in so many different ways. 

Tuesday started out with a morning run, french toast, and then a volleyball tournament.  The weather has been great temperatures in the low 70's, perfect for running.  Later today we will have a leadership discussion for current captains and ones that want to be a future leaders for the team. 

Week 7 has ended with both teams piling up their most miles in a single week, Girls 495 miles and the Boys 430.  The girls have had very good attendance for morning runs and afternoons.  On Tuesday we did continuous relays, at University Park, of about 800 meters.  Everyone did a great job and we had no one complaining about the really warm weather.  Thursday the team went out to Turtle River State Park and did a river run and by the amount of cheering and wet runners they had a great time.  Friday we ran in the graveyard and did our "gravedigger" workout. Again I was super impressed with this young group of runners, their was no complaints they just ran hard! 

Even with the girls running more mileage than the boys the last two weeks the boys still lead over all with 2605 miles.  But the girls are gaining fast and have totaled 2402 miles.

Everyone is getting excited for the camping trip and ready to leave for Bemidji on Monday!

One hour flight from Edinburgh to Paris, nine hours Paris to Minneapolis, 5 hours from there to Grand Forks, 5460 miles and we are home! Our trip was an amazing adventure for our whole family and we saw some amazing things.  We all really enjoyed the two older castles we saw, Tantallon and Dirleton.  We loved staying in the little sea side village of New Berwick, taking our daily walks along the beach and the tastey resturants in the town, especially the fresh Fish n Chips (french fries). 

We all took a dip in the Firth of Forth, which is part of the North Sea.  Even though I was 6000 miles from home, I still thought about the team back home in Grand Forks and made the tribute to them (below) in the sand along the beach!

Cheers from Scotland!!  We are having a lot of fun here.  We spent our first day getting accustomed to our surroundings and investigating the local town of North Berwick.  The house we have rented here is only five miles from where the British Open, at the Muirfield Course, will start next week.  We have already went to an ancient castle Dirlenton.  Collin and Meghan took dozens of pictures.  We traveled into Edinburgh today and took a double decker bus around to see all of the sites and then explored Edinburgh Castle.  We are going back to Edinburgh tomorrow and then Glasgow the day after.  Evenings have been spent walking along the beach and seeing the sunsets.  There are dozen of golf courses by us.  Meghan and I plan on running along the beach and maybe see if their golf course works as well as USA ones to run on. 

Next summer will be 10 years since I first met Coach Allan and joined Central cross country. I never knew how much it would change my life and help me develop my future. I wanted to share one of my best experiences. For those of you that are new to the team, you have yet to experience "ball busters". Without a doubt the hardest workout you will do as a runner if you push yourself hard enough on them. Summer before my senior year, I decided to go for the record of 16. To put that into running terms, that's running 2:00 hard, 2:00 easy, 1:00 hard, 1:00 easy, 30 seconds hard, 30 seconds easy continuously. That's 1 set. I got through set 15 and didn't know if I had another set in me. As I was coming down the hill, I turned the corner to see all my teammates cheering as hard as they could for me. I decided not only to set/break the record, but to do it on the harder of the two hills to push myself more. I ended at 18 and had only my teammates to thank for that. Especially Ronnie Kyllo and Skyler Wixo (now my Wife Skyler Parrish). Keep your mind and heart in this sport and always trust yourself. You
truly have no idea just how far it will take you. Above all, listen to every tip Coach Allan gives you. Good luck to all you runners this season!!!

GO KNIGHTS!