Can this apply to a high school girl? Winter Training Questions

They are general guidelines that happen to be good for building a strong male high school cross country team because they have some basis in truth (or what our current scientific understanding of the body indicates) and the weaknesses are covered by the age group they are addressing.

High School boys in general recover fast, and typically after a first year of building up will be plenty capable of holding an 8 minute mile while still feeling the effort as 'easy'. There is probably even some validity to his argument about certain paces promoting better form and muscle usages, but if you can't run 8 minute miles comfortably yet then it isn't very useful advice to try exert yourself 6 days a week at that pace.

Your plan to simply build to 50 ((or even 65) is going to benefit you monumentally no matter what. If you can hit that level of volume when you haven't been previously there will be huge improvements.

Thank you for the feedback.

Last year I didn't run a lot of mileage. 20-25mpw and then 25-30mpw over track. This year I've gotten up to 40mpw,

You're right about exerting myself 6 days a week at 8 minute pace. I'm thinking just sub10 pace.

"Too much lower than 168 steps per minute is not likely to be an efficient way to run when it comes to stress on your body, and for distance runners doing 6:00-8:00 pace, I really prefer to see them hitting 172-180 steps per minute."

Thanks to high-tech watches and run-sharing websites, you can actually see what cadence pros use during their daily runs. And either all the high-cadence-is-always-better pros are more secretive about their data, or this "180/min or go home" idea is best left to the doped-up cyclists.

As for the 8:00/mile or faster, he is specifically talking about a top boys program. This is probably around 75% of their hour-threshold pace. Also, there is much debate over how slow is too slow, though most HSers probably don't have time to do long runs slower than 75% of threashold.

SCHSRunnerGirl wrote:

1. I already Run six days per week at an easy to moderate pace

2. Do (almost) all of your runs at 8:00/mi or faster

I'm not sure how I feel about this. But I feel like it's also the reason I'm not improving because I'm jogging away at 10-11 minutes/mi.

You are right to connect the slow paces with slow running. Prioritize doing a quick pace (not race pace) and slightly increasing mileage for three weeks in a row, then do 1/3 less mileage the fourth week trying your best to stick to a pace that hurts pretty good at the end. Repeat that cycle.

SCHSRunnerGirl wrote:

4. Run every day

Wait as in you can't take a day off or what?

Some people don't respond well to this. Maybe you are one of these people. Especially in the off-season, you need to be aerobically active and working on building strength. That doesn't mean you must run. Is there anything else you can do that's pretty aerobic?

I might have missed it, but I didn't see what events you run in your post. Can you post that and your current paces?

I run the 5k in cross. In track I would like to try running the 1600 and 3200. But also developing good 800 meter speed

Current prs:

I didn't really race a lot last year. Because I was injured inexperienced and inconsistent.

When I did it was pretty bad.

800m pr 2:55

1600: (I didn't really run it last year.) 6:45

3200: 15:10

5k: 25:10

Race pace is about 7:50-8:00.Tempo Is about 8:45-8:55. Easy pace 10:00-11:00

Most of this applies to the top boys programs.