Sept. 3, 2010

Senior Shannon Murakami, junior David McDonald and coaches Forest Braden and Johnny Gray will be giving fans a behind-the-scenes look at Bruin cross country throughout the season.

Hey Everyone! Alright, so for those of you who don't know me, here is a small introduction. My name is Shannon Murakami and I am a senior on the UCLA cross country team. This season I will serve as one of the captains along with Kelcie Wiemann.

We're getting ready to kick off our season this Saturday, and like any first week of training camp it's been crazy busy. We all arrived on Monday afternoon,and the first stop after unpacking the new apartment was a compliance meeting which is not exactly the most exciting thing. Then came our gear issue which is basically like Christmas in August. At gear issue we get all of our Adidas gear for the season like shoes, shirts, uniforms, etc. Our women's team, which is double the size it was last year, got to get together and go for a run. Runs are always a pretty easy ice breaker when it comes to welcoming the new freshies. Everyone talks about how their summer training went which for me included hundred mile weeks, but every girl is different. I love coming back and finding out how everyone trained because not all runners train the same. Some of our girls run lower weekly mileage (between 30-40 miles a week) while some girls run 70-100 miles a week.

Well now we're getting ready for our first race this weekend at Fullerton. We had a six-mile tempo as a team on Tuesday and everyone ran great. The team really runs well together and very smooth. We all ran the paces we were supposed to. Workouts like that make me really excited to race as a team. I really believe that our team is going to be great this year and we're only going to get better. Today, we talked about how excited we are for the race and which teams are going to be at the meet. I think we're going to dominate. I think the freshmen might be a little nervous about the new 6K distance (in high school it's a 5K), but I have faith that they are all ready to run really fast. We have our pre-race dinner on Friday night and then it's off to the races on Saturday morning. Everyone is really excited and we're all ready to run fast. It's time to show everyone that we're back and ready to compete against the best. This meet is just a stepping stone to greatness.

Bye for now!
Shannon Murakami

Coach Johnny Gray also checked in with an update and how he feels about the upcoming season.

I am very excited about the start of the season on Saturday. This will be my second year with the team after jumping into the fire last summer. The good thing about this year is that we have built a solid foundation the past year with these kids instead of kind of coming in in the middle of their training. That gives us a big advantange because everyone knows each other more. The middle distance kids will run more cross country meets during the season then they have in years past to build of their base and background to help them in the track season. Overall, everyone is coming in with more confidnece in themselves and the coaches. Being confident will make a huge difference in the training. We'll head to Fullerton on Saturday and look for some solid opening results.

Go Bruins!
Johnny Gray