High School vs. College Training

No, high school runners should not train harder than college runners.

The problem is that high school runners are more competitive than college runners with their teammates. By college, most runners have figured out they need to race the other teams on the weekends not their buddies on Monday through Friday.

I trained "harder" (more intense workouts more frequently, also more races) in high school than in college. I also ran a lot faster in college than in high school. Go figure...

High schoolers do seem to have incredible recovery capabilities though, even compared to college kids.

I am a high school coach, but was also a D2 all American going through a great college system.

One of the reasons my workouts for high schoolers are of higher intensity (not always, just more often than I'd like) Is because a lot of the runners don't train much or at all over the winter, and I have to get them into shape faster. We have a 12 week window.

In college we had from December until May - we didn't need to squeeze in hard workouts because we had a 6 month window.

For my guys who run all winter, their training is different come the spring because they've prepared

Im in high school and my coach sucks balls. He doesn't know anything and all though we only run 10mpw in this part of the season (I run way more, I just use his mileage as kind of a booster+ my xc coach will be bringing us out of the dark age soon) he has us do retarded workouts. I will give you todays workout this is for distance guys but my coach doesnt give a about any distance event other than 800, as he thinks that the 4x8 and 4x4 are the only important events.

Two laps around the football field for warmup, then rolling out and stretching

Additional 1 mile warmup for distance guys, which my team decided to cut down to 0.72, according to my watch. They are also not smart when it comes to training.

Then we did 3 down and backs on the football field, jogging down the field and coming back at 60 percent of sprint speed, then 70% then 80%.

He then asked us how our legs were feeling and if we were up to running 300 meters at 80%. We did then jogged 3 laps on the football field, then did 2 down and backs same as before at 80% and then 90%. Great workout huh?

I trained a lot harder in college than high school. College running should be a lot harder, but also smarter. By college you've figured out what works for you, what kind of pace feels easy, hard, etc. How many miles a week you can run before breaking down. In high school, unless I was doing intervals or like 3-5 miles tempo, I was running easy. In college my workouts got a lot longer than they did in hs. Etc.

lkasj345 wrote:

By college, most runners have figured out they need to race the other teams on the weekends not their buddies on Monday through Friday.

Lol. You didn't run a very good team. Most have to race workouts to make the travel team.

adsfasfdsf wrote:

High schoolers do seem to have incredible recovery capabilities though, even compared to college kids.

I would believe this, but does anyone have an argument or evidence that's not just anecdotal? An article or study would be nice.

A really successful HS coach wrote:

One of the reasons my workouts for high schoolers are of higher intensity (not always, just more often than I'd like) Is because a lot of the runners don't train much or at all over the winter, and I have to get them into shape faster. We have a 12 week window.

So it's just because of the constraints of the high school system? Makes some sense to me, although it doesn't apply to a lot of teams which are able to train year-round.

I've also heard the argument that shorter (but more intense) workouts require less recovery time, which works better with high schoolers who have to race once or more per week. I don't buy that though, especially if you're doing high intensity almost exclusively.

A couple thoughts...

1) High school workouts are considered harder in intensity relative to race time probably because a typical novice doesn't know how to go to the well at all. They don't even see a level of 8 or beyond on an RPI scale of 1-10. They have their own shutdown mechanism before they reach that intensity. So many of them can handle 2-3 workouts per week since they never really redline.

2) College runners are usually the opposite. They realize they can crank and actually need a far more substantial recovery period. Pros are on a level even beyond this. Go look at Oregon Project's post-race workouts. They make the day big and then probably spend way more time recovering afterward. They don't do these small dips into hard stuff as often. That is a HS workout.

The key for HS runners is knowing how much each runner is really cranking. How close are they to redline? It really DOES matter.

What I've seen is that most high schoolers train like milers. Develop the speed young before they head off to college and switch to more threshold work to develop the strength.