Worst coach youve ever had

A coach I had made us do drills backwards just so we were prepared if we ran backwards in a cross country race.

Had one that focused on "quality". Maybe 30 miles a week.

60 min long run once a week. Sh1tty results for 5k runners. Surprise! Mileage makes a difference.

2 miles a day, had a post snack after. Usually a donut or popsicle.

Ended up running 19:30 ish freshman year.

Definitely my coach in college. Had me do almost exclusively long slow distance, even though I was a speed-oriented runner. Salient result (in addition to slow race times): I was crippled at age 20 with a foot injury that never healed, and I never was able to run again.

I was self-coached in college, by the way.

Ran for a Pac-10 (at the time) coach who recruited excellent talent every year, most of whom had at most one good year before getting injured and never approaching their potential. As a middle distance runner you started doing intervals twice per week in November in preparation for spring track.

lease wrote:

Definitely my coach in college. Had me do almost exclusively long slow distance, even though I was a speed-oriented runner. Salient result (in addition to slow race times): I was crippled at age 20 with a foot injury that never healed, and I never was able to run again.

I was self-coached in college, by the way.

3/10 not bad

For me it was my college coach. Coached in the ACC and still does. I wont say who but by looking at reults you can probably figure it out. Not a single person reached there potential under him and he would blame the team when all 20 guys ran poorly.

Low Mileage LOL wrote:

Had one that focused on "quality". Maybe 30 miles a week.

60 min long run once a week. Sh1tty results for 5k runners. Surprise! Mileage makes a difference.

My high school coach was my best coach ever. He had us train exactly like what you're describing. We won 2 state championships and were runners up the other 2 years I was on high school. Had a steak of 5 consecutive individual state champions, and had 5 different guys running collegiality on scholarship one year. Surprise! Hard work makes a difference.

My college coach was also pretty good - conference and regional coach of the year too many times to count. I guess that leaves me as my worst coach ever. I've been coaching myself for 2 years and have not PR'd.

My high school XC coach had us run about 25 miles a week, had team bonding the night before meets where we would eat a bunch of junk food, and discouraged Sunday long runs. He found out I was doing long runs on my own on Sundays, so once cancelled Monday practice and held practice on Sunday and had us play games instead of running. A huge waste of my time, obviously, and I ran long after practice anyway. The games were not out of the ordinary either. Once or twice a week the coach would have us play capture the flag instead of running. No joke he told me it was to work on our speed. The oddest thing about it was that my coach was a sub-3 hour marathoner. Obviously he wasn't great, but he must've understood something about running and training.

D2 coach in PA that was a great runner but 100% worked the program around what was best for his daughter. Brag about conference results but we were not competitive at Nats.

i chose D2 wrote:

Low Mileage LOL wrote:

Had one that focused on "quality". Maybe 30 miles a week.

60 min long run once a week. Sh1tty results for 5k runners. Surprise! Mileage makes a difference.

My high school coach was my best coach ever. He had us train exactly like what you're describing. We won 2 state championships and were runners up the other 2 years I was on high school. Had a steak of 5 consecutive individual state champions, and had 5 different guys running collegiality on scholarship one year. Surprise! Hard work makes a difference.

.

#1- this wasn't high school, this was college

#2- your high school probably wasn't in CA

#3- 5 scholarship runners would've been good with any training

Low Mileage LOL wrote:

i chose D2 wrote:

My high school coach was my best coach ever. He had us train exactly like what you're describing. We won 2 state championships and were runners up the other 2 years I was on high school. Had a steak of 5 consecutive individual state champions, and had 5 different guys running collegiality on scholarship one year. Surprise! Hard work makes a difference.

.

#1- this wasn't high school, this was college

#2- your high school probably wasn't in CA

#3- 5 scholarship runners would've been good with any training

Okay if that was in college it was pretty bad.

Did anyone reach their academic potential? You clearly didn\'t, not knowing the difference between \"there\" and \"their\".

br0ski wrote:

Not a single person reached there potential under him and he would blame the team when all 20 guys ran poorly.

We've got a real joker this year. Clearly some ignorant moron who shows up here for a paycheck and nothing more. Sit back and grab some popcorn, you're gonna absolutely love this:

So this guy shows up one day, tells us he's our new distance track coach. I ask him what kind of level he's competed at, says hes All-American in the 400m hurdles. I'm immediately amazed, I ask him his best times. Claims he ran a 41 second 400 and a 43.5 second 400 hurdles. First impression, this guys a moron. Later in the year he tells us he's a professor at a University so he can't be present at practice Tuesdays and Thursdays. We look up the college's faculty, his name is nowhere on the list. Claims he went on 4 tours to Afghanistan (he's 25 years old), also claims he's a Brigadier General in the Marines (takes about 30 years to earn that rank). Claims he rode his triathalon bike down a hill at 60+ miles an hour cause he was late for work.

First day of practice we do a 10 minute warm up for mileage, only to be told that we must run 6 miles at 5K pace. When told that this is impossible, his only reply was "you gotta run fast eventually, may as well do it now." Whateer that means, he clearly had no knowledge of distance running or any kind of running for that matter.

First real race with real competition of the year, our top mile and 2 mile guy is running the 2 mile in a stacked meet. Gonna be a close one. Total upset, our 2 mile guy absolutely drops the field, wins by 200 meters and shatters the meet record. Monday at practice he is in trouble with the coach for "leading the race". Coach says he should've done a sit and kick on some kids with 2:00 800 speed but only 16:3x+ 5K endurance. Follows that up with a workout where we "simulate a race", by having the slow people box in the fast people for 2 laps, then the last lap all the slow people move into lane 4 on the turn and the fast people dead sprint the last lap. Because in a race, when the bell rings anyone thats boxing you in is going to quickly move to lane 4 to allow you to outkick them.

Ah, I loved Coach Captain Brigadier General Professor World Record Holder Wilson.

My XC team does about 30. We do not do long runs, the longest run we went on all season was maybe 4 miles. We double 3 times a week and all our morning runs are at like 95 percent effort. We have guys running faster in practice than in a race. My coach is a really good coach, in the sense that he is very motivating and relatable, but he is a bad coach in that he doesn't really give us the proper workload. I have been on my own all winter and have dropped about 2.5-3 minutes of my 5k (I run faster in tempo runs now than in XC season), 11 seconds off my 800, and 24 seconds off of my mile. I am on my own to run as much mileage as I want this track season (doubling everday but days of meets) but I am worried that I will be subject to the bad XC mileage again.

Sounds like a real piece of work

My HS coach used to trash athletes behind their backs to other guys on the team. Then, after pointing out all the crap he hated about each of us to every other guy, he'd preach "teamwork." He was a prick generally, so everyone was intimidated by him but few, if any, respected him. Nothing like being coached by a guy with the maturity of a 12-year-old girl.

LOL total doosh canoe so far your winning KOD

Funny Bad: Football coach who got stuck coaching distance track made us do bear crawls, wheelbarrows and piggy back rides (don't ask).

Serious Bad: Before I started running, (about age 14) I had soccer coaches who talked to my sister behind my back about how much I sucked at soccer. Of course my sis told me. Then they cut me from the team, but not before spending an hour in their office with me telling me how I'd never amount to anything in life. Silver lining was that this was what made me get into running.

txRUNNERgirl wrote:

Funny Bad: Football coach who got stuck coaching distance track made us do bear crawls, wheelbarrows and piggy back rides (don't ask).

Serious Bad: Before I started running, (about age 14) I had soccer coaches who talked to my sister behind my back about how much I sucked at soccer. Of course my sis told me. Then they cut me from the team, but not before spending an hour in their office with me telling me how I'd never amount to anything in life. Silver lining was that this was what made me get into running.

We had a football coach for XC in high school. He was pretty good -- at the beginning of school, he told us to stay out of trouble or get our asses beat (this was the deep south, so he did mean it literally), and went off to football practice. He got us to meets and we did our thing.