For our fourth podcast, we talk to former elite runner Ben Rosario, who now spends his time coaching the Northern Arizona Elite Hoka Team.
We talk to Ben about how he got his strat in running and talked to Ben about what his high school running career was like.
With Ben having run at a D-II school we talked about how high school kids who may not be good enough to run at a D-I school should not give up their running dreams.
Ben goes into depth about the possibilities that D-II and D-III schools offer for runners. His advice about finding the right fit for you after high school is pure gold for any high school distance runner.
We then talked about how Ben made the transition into coaching after being a runner for the Hanson Brook's distance project.
We discussed how his Northern Arizona Elite team ended up in a deal with the Hoka running company.
Ben spends a lot of time explaining exactly how his current squad got together to form one of the top teams in the world.
We spend a few minutes talking about the unique uniforms for Hoka NAZ-Elite.
We talk about the marathon Olympic Trials where NAZ-Elite had a top 6 finisher on both the men and women's side. We also discuss the deep NAZ-Elite 5k and 10k teams in the upcoming U.S. Olympic Trials where 3 of the 24 runners on both sexes are NAZ-Elite members.
Ben discusses why he believes there is an advantage to running as a group when training as an elite athlete.
We also discuss the overall healthy of the potential U.S. Olympics Team where Ben believes we have medal opportunities from the 800m through the 10k.
Final Surge announced Northern Arizona Elite as a partner just recently. We discuss how NAZ started using Final Surge.
We talked about how he has been using Final Surge with his team and how his favorite part is you can tell it is made by runners, for runners.
NAZ-Elite is making all their running logs available online at FinalSurge.com/NAZElite. Any coach, using Final Surge or any other log should have their athletes look at the NAZ logs to see the types of information that are being included in logs.
NAZ-Elite's mission statement is "Train hard, race fearlessly and share every part of our journey with our fans." That is why they completely open up their training logs.
We then discussed a recent Scott Smith log entry which ended included:
Run - Easy Run + drills/strides/plyos
Normal drills. 8 x 150 meter hard but smooth strides. Plyos= 2 x all single leg exercises. 1x all squat jumps/bounds.
Ben has a theory that he doesn't want to be just runners, he wants to be athletic. The biggest thing he works on is getting off the ground as quick as possible as many times as possible which is why they do explosive plyo work.
This question came in from Twitter… Coach, you have a lot going on in your life right now with the team, writing, family, any time management tips you have for busy athletes?
@FinalSurge @BenRosario1 @LucusHumphrey how does Ben manage his time with all he does/ coach, write book, podcast, family etc
— Doug Petrick (@DougPetrick1) June 18, 2016
Ben has agreed to give one listener a signed copy of his HS XC book Tradition, Class Pride; you can find out details on that give-a-way at Finalsurge.com/promo.
You can get a copy of that book at traditionclasspride.com. Ben can be found in the following places:
Ben On Twitter
NAZ Elite on Twitter
NAZ Elite Training Programs