Blogs : NCAA Division III Blog

Interviews: Steve and Yarrow Pasche of Luther

    (Photos courtesy of the Luther College athletics website)

Steve and Yarrow Pasche are in their second year as head and associate cross-country coach for both the men’s and women’s programs at Luther College (IA).  Prior to taking over the Norse programs Steve and Yarrow spent two years as assistant cross country and track coaches at Williams College (MA).

Interview by: Keith Solverson (10/22/2006)

Coach Steve Pasche, how has the transition from Williams College to Luther College been for you and Yarrow? 

As much as we loved Williams, we have thoroughly enjoyed the transition to Luther.  The tradition for great cross country runs deep here, and the support that the teams have from the community and alumni is amazing.  We host a JV dual meet with UW-La Crosse’s men, and I expect there will be over 400 spectators in attendance.  Luther and Williams both have passionate students and runners, and this area of Northeastern Iowa may even rival the Berkshires for access to great training grounds.  What more could we ask for?

Are there a lot of differences between the two programs?

Boiling the programs down to their respective elements, there are few differences.  We both have distance runners that are passionate about seeing how good they can get, and camaraderie is at the root of development in both places.

Your men’s and women’s team have been running well this season.  In particular, your women’s team had a great showing at the Tori Neubauer Invite on Oct. 14.  What are your goals for both squads heading into conference, regionals, and nationals? 

Sports psychologists would probably have a field day with us, but we don’t coach quantitative goals for our teams at the championships or otherwise.  Last weekend at La Crosse, we simply tried to put a full roster of good races together.  In doing that, we are a very good team regardless of how our competitors end up. We will continue with that goal into our championships, except that we will aim to have our very best races.

What made you want to become a collegiate cross country coach and what steps did you take in achieving this goal?

In 2002, I jotted down a list of a few distance running coaches, collegiate and otherwise, that I aspired to study under. I had already collected some pretty good experiences in distance running that included observing Tim Miles for four years while I was at Saint Johns, studying exercise physiology at the University of Iowa, and coaching for three years as the head men’s cross country and men’s distance track coach at Macalester College.  In 2003, Yarrow and I were resting in Kathmandu between two twenty-day backpacking trips in the Nepal Himalaya when Pete Farwell at Williams emailed unprompted to inquire about the possibility of serving an assistant position for him. We had been traveling around Asia for a few months already, and Williams College was on my list, so the Karma was quite overwhelming.  We subsequently spent the next two years at Williams, reveling in the fortune of learning within one of the best distance programs in the country.  As planned, coach Farwell took a sabbatical to New Zealand for coaching research in the winter/spring of 2005, so we also gained the experience of heading up a top notch distance program for track.  We learned heaps from head track coach Ralph White, who is very poignant, so a person can’t help but be strongly influenced by his great direction.  The exposure to ideas and techniques was extraordinary at Williams, but I had yet to land a job to really make a career out of my passion.  As a side note, I was now late twenties age-wise and the most money I had ever made in a year was from an assistantship while a grad student at Iowa, so you could say that our time honeymooning was about over. Yarrow and I had plans to get married out in the mountains in Washington that following summer and maybe stay out West while I tried to gather some more experiences with icons of the sport… or buckle down and learn how to be a carpenter or something.  In the meantime, our Karma came around and the job at Luther College opened up.  We visited and saw great ingredients for distance running there, so we jumped on it.  We’ve been coaches ever since.  The moral of my story to aspiring coaches is to soak up all the great experiences you possibly can in running and especially otherwise.  Follow your passions.  And lastly, make sure your steps follow the scenic path as it will be much richer. 

Would you briefly describe your program’s training philosophy (volume, intensity, etc.)?

Despite my academic background in physiology, my own experiences have guided me to believe that the whole process is heaps more fun when one resists the Daniels-momentum that looks to structure distance running into a science.  Personally, I enjoy the process a lot more when I don’t have a chart or a heart rate monitor to tell me exactly how fast to run.  When I feel good I know it and when I don’t, I know it too.  The key is to listen to the messages when they come and respond in an appropriate way.  I believe that a coach can teach this over time.  Needless to say, we don’t wear heart rate monitors and we rarely measure distances for our workouts, as we facilitate workouts that are run by feel and effort rather than by a calculated pace where the runner tries to hit times over a given distance.  Now that I’ve gone off about being all intuitive, I’ll retract from my early sentiments and admit that I pour every ounce of energy, experience, and knowledge, that I have into a season’s schedule.  In the end I believe that our schedule will be very physiologically sound, but to the runner plucks the notes of the schedule perhaps it will play as their favorite song.  Not mechanically scientific, but natural.  Would you rather train with Cerutty at the sand dunes in Portsea, and with Lydiard on the trails within the Waitakere Range, or on a Los Angeles track held to the science of a stopwatch with Igloi?

Getting back to the type of running that we do, we have a tendency to emphasize volume over intensity, but it really depends on who it is and at what part of the season it is.   To be a stringent adherent to one side of the spectrum or the other will preclude a lot of very good runners from becoming as good as they can be, or even enjoying the process.  As coaches, we spend a lot of time trying to get a training schedule together that works wonders for everybody, but the reality is that people are just different and so we need to have a lot of flexibility in accommodating different types.  For every success that we have coached, there is a different story.

Are there any specific workouts that you feel prepare your team for important meets (championship season)?

The tallest peaks are on top of the biggest bases. The rest is just to get a feel for racing.

It is a classic Lydiard way of looking at things.

What does a typical training block look like for your program the last three weeks of the season?

Keith, someday we will sit down at length and have a dialogue to exchanging ideas and learn from each other.  Until then, I will hold my comments.  There is an edge that comes with training in obscurity.  Like Cerutty’s and Lydiard’s runners on their respective islands in the South Pacific, we have our relative isolation here in Decorah surrounded by our prairie, the geologic bed of an ancient ocean.  The fossils are evidence that this is our Tasman Sea.  We have the Waitakere in the trails that wind through the Winneshiek bluffs.  And like Cerutty and Lydiard, we will continue to focus on the other forty-nine weeks of the year while we keep some secrets.

What are your thoughts about the new qualifying format for the NCAA’s?

I dislike the ambiguity of the current system as compared to the historical method or normalization.  Previous to this intervention, Division III cross country was primarily free from the judgment of a panel that makes their qualitative assessment of a performance.  Now we are getting like gymnastics.  I can’t reconcile that the need exists for this in cross country. 

Regardless, the essence of qualifying for nationals has not changed.  Run your best races at your Championships and you will be giving it your best shot at finding a spot on the line at Nationals.

What changes would you like to see made?

See below.

Anything else you would like to add?

http://www.iaaf.org/WXC06/news/Kind=2/newsId=34130.html

Thanks to Steve and Yarrow Pasche for a great interview.

IIAC Meet

9:15 PM, October 28, 2006 .. Posted by Anonymous

Congratulations to Steve and Yarrow Pasche for sweeping the IIAC meet today. They were also named the coaches of the year for both the men and women. It looks like Luther College is back on the rise thanks to these two determined individuals.