Eleven Coral Reef Senior High School runners spent 10 days training at about 7,000 feet in Flagstaff, Arizona, swapping Miami’s summer heat for thin mountain air as they built toward the fall cross-country season.
The July 27-Aug. 5 trip was the program’s fifth annual summer training camp but its first outside Colorado. Head coach David Suarez said colleagues recommended Flagstaff as a popular high-altitude destination, and the team wanted a change of scenery.
“The weather was great, the trails were great, and doing stuff throughout the day with the team was great … Now we can probably do a couple years in Arizona, a couple years in Colorado, and have a good rotation going on,” Suarez told The Raider Voice, the school’s student newspaper.
Most runners logged about 50 miles during the trip, compared with 30 to 40 miles in a typical week at home, with some running twice on certain days.
The trip’s toughest test came on an 11-mile long run along the A-1 Trail. Senior Emilio Perez Garcia, one of the team’s captains, said the run pushed teammates into situations they had never faced and that the discomfort would pay off during the regular season.
Not everything went to plan. On the first run along Soldier Trail, middle school head coach Disner Moreno injured his ankle and could not run for the rest of the trip. That evening, darkness fell before the group found its way back to the parking lot. Runners used the flashlights on their running watches to navigate the trail, arriving about an hour late as Suarez guided them.
On the final night, the team gathered around a bonfire behind the house where they stayed. Each runner wrote personal season goals on paper, read them aloud and burned the paper. Sophomore Adrian Bernstein said the group also voted for team captains and set five collective goals for the season.
The Barracudas were scheduled to hold time trials Aug. 15, 10 days after returning from Arizona. Suarez said the summer plan was designed to build an aerobic base so runners would be race-ready when the regular season began.
