Nate Peck's Journal

January, 12 2009 Entry (Posted January 16, 2009)

Well, I am writing this the day after what was quite possibly the worst race of my entire life. I ran a 3K at my alma mater, Grand Valley State University. They have recently built a new oversized indoor track, which I can honestly say is one of the nicest indoor tracks I have ever had the opportunity to race on.

Anyway, onto the race; it was terrible. It felt like one of those miles you run in fifth grade where you have no idea what it’s going to feel like, so you just run really hard until you realize you are in over your head; yeah, pretty much sums it up. We came through the 800 in 2:08, which was certainly a bit fast for my first track race in six months, but we slowed it down and came through the mile at 4:23 which was about where I wanted to be on paper before the race. At that point my rabbit stepped off the track and it was just me. I can’t lie; I felt fairly strong at that point, but for some reason I just kept going backwards. I finished with a disappointing 8:20, and just sort of pouted for a while until I felt like I had given myself a sufficient enough mental beat down.

I’d like to blame a lot of the race on one of the worst winters I’ve been through during my lifetime in western Michigan. The cycle has gone something like this:10 inches of snow in a night, 10 more inches of snow the next night, 3 inches of snow, warm rain that melts the previous week’s snow creating a biblical flood, back to freezing temperatures turning the roads into 99.8 percent ice and .2 percent runable road, then repeat that pattern for the next week. It has been pretty hard to manage especially with the rec. center on campus being shut down for either a) horrible weather or b) the holiday season.

Anyway, I realize this has just been a depressing rant about how lame-o things have been around here, but I feel like training was flawlessly progressing forward while at ZAP and now that I have come home for the holidays things have been pretty stagnant. I just need to suck things up and stop being a girly-man.

I am completely looking forward to our winter training camp in Florida next week to get things going back in the right direction. I have some big races coming up in the next month so hopefully next time I write one of these it will be a pleasant discussion on how easy it was to run a PR.

Introductory Entry (Posted September 23, 2008)

With this being my first blog entry as a ZAP athlete I figure I should probably take the time to introduce myself. My name is Nate Peck (obviously) and I came to ZAP from an NCAA Division II school named Grand Valley State Univeristy which is located on the west side of the great state of Michigan. I actually was born and raised in Coopersville, Michigan, which happens to be about 10 minutes outside of Grand Valley’s campus. So basically, my sheltered little life has been lived within a 15-mile bubble, which made the move to ZAP a tad intimidating.

I‘ve found the most challenging aspect of being an athlete here at ZAP comes in the form of time management. Outside of the running, there isn’t a whole lot of scheduled activities so you have to find some way to entertain yourself. The big time killer thus far has been Mario Kart, although we’ve backed off a bit since Nightingale almost had an aneurism over a pretty bush league series of events during a race (if you’ve played on hard you know what I’m talking about here). I also have a season started in Madden ’08 where I play as the Detroit Lions. It’s probably the most unrealistic videogame that has ever been created, in that my Lions have been undefeated for a couple seasons, and everyone knows that God himself could not give the Lions a winning season. Other hits for time consumption include: reading (I just started to read The Grapes of Wrath, and then I plan on starting the Harry Potter series after that), and along with reading comes naps (especially when you are reading The Grapes of Wrath), eating an unbelievable amount of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and plain old movie watching.

As far as running goes, the transition has been quite smooth. Pete has eased us into the training and my body is finally adjusting to the nonstop hill action. I can’t even begin to express how excited I am about training and competing at ZAP. I really feel that they have made the sky the limit around here and they provide us with everything a young bright-eyed runner like myself could ever need. In fact, if I were forced to think of something to complain about here it would probably take a couple weeks; even then I would probably have to lie because they really have covered every base. Anyway, hopefully I’ll be kicking out some major results here in the near future, my first race is the Apple Fest 4-miler in Erwin Tennessee. The veterans here keep telling me about the horrors of their “rustbusters” early in the season, and this will most likely be that for all of us newbies here at ZAP.