Jack Daniels for High School Runners

I employed tuesday/Wednesday being workouts. We race on Saturdays and I liked having an extra recovery day after the race and two easy days before Saturday's race. We did our tempo on Tuesday and an interval session of 800s, 1000s, or 1200s on Wednesday. It worked but just about anything will work if you can get HS students to buy in.

Too much mileage coach for kids that age!! You need to dial back the mileage at least 50% for the freshmen and increase it in increments for each older student. 90-100 minute runs? Are you kidding me? You'll have half the team quitting after the first couple weeks the rest will all have shin splints, plantar fascitis and stress fractures before the season is over.

Also no teenager should ever be running a hard surface like a road.

You should read a book designed for teenage runners like: The Youth and Teen Running Encyclopedia: A Complete Guide for Middle and Long Distance Runners Ages 6 to 18

I like the back to back plan though it doesn't work for this 51 year old bag of bones. Besides the extra day of rest, I think the other point he makes is that if the kids know they have another "hard" workout on Tuesday, it reduces the tendency to "race" the intervals on Monday. More likely to get two workouts at the proper pace.

par buster

Thanks for the input. I will clarify a bit. 90 min is the max for most upperclassmen a few sr boys may get to a 100 min run. And we certainly build to this only getting the 90-100 min run once or twice a year. Freshman do not get that high. but do get 60-80 min easy runs. Not saying we have had no injuries but less than most teams I see around here and very little trouble with kids quitting/hating running. I think we have had one stress fracture in the 8 plus years we have been doing this. Overall mileage peaks at 50 for a couple good senior boys.(None last year) and 40-45 for most sop/JR/Sr's. As for roads, we take what we can get, not a lot of trail options around our HS.

Coach and Beard scratcher:

thanks for the input. Yes I have read about the kids running workouts at proper paces. That is a big problem for us, especially kids doing the threshold too fast. (of course that is a problem I have had as well!!) and not getting the proper, full benefit from it.

I'm Curious Coach, you do threshold first then intervals, and that is what Daniels said as well. Why that order?? I seem to think that the interval session is "harder" and maybe slightly more important (at least short term) so I was thinking doing that first followed by the threshold, hoping also that being a bit tired from the interval would slow down the threshold paces a bit.

This varies a lot. Some kids can handle more miles and some can't. I worked with kids that were in program that hadn't had much success in several years. They had been doing 20-30 miles a week in the summer (a lot of soccer players in the bunch) and maybe 30-40 during the season and they'd only get 1 or 2 under 17 each year. So I started working with younger (going into freshman-sophomore season) runners who put soccer as secondary and who wanted to run.

We started nice and easy over early summer, at 30 mpw of running and some cross training. All running was on trails and dirt roads. The long runs started at 60 minutes. By July and August they were going 45 with long runs of 90 to 100 minutes on trails. Those kids took over the varsity and bumped off the upperclassmen, and suddenly there were 4-5 going sub 17. And the next year it was 6, and the next couple years after that 7 or 8, and as they got to be upper classmen the older kids were doing 50+, up to about 60 with long runs up to 2 hr. Overuse injuries were rare.

My HS coach must not have read the "Teenagers shouldn't run on roads" or "30 mpw is too much" chapters.

I agree 100-minute long runs are a bit much for most high schoolers though.

In my experience it's easier to do the threshold/tempo first and the intervals the next day. I can recover better from the tempo and need a recovery day after intervals.

Agree with experiment of one and with a race on Saturday you're pretty much recovered from an interval session on Wednesday especially if the kids keep to their paces.