My XC team is racing twice a week?

The overwhelming majority of HS kids get into sports so they can compete. Many of the country's top HS teams have multiple weeks with two meets.

A savvy coach knows how to manage such a schedule, which gives more kids a chance to race. S/he can still have the top kids ready, fresh, and peaked for State.

I race Monday Thursday and Saturday every week until late October

Your coach should have a handle on this.

If you are a top team in the state (or a top runner) you shouldn't have to run all out or run every race to win your small meets.

If you aren't a top team in the state then you should focus on winning the small meets first.

Additionally, if you aren't working out much and running lower mileage, recovery should not be an issue

Twice a week every week is too much. Are you misrepresenting your schedule? You really never have any weeks off?

The issue is that if you race twice a week, you basically cant include any workouts, and races are not a good substitute for workouts.

This is the norm for New Jersey, where I coached for a few years.

Dual meets during the week (usually on Tuesday), then invites on Saturday.

It's a terrible schedule and there are too many dunderhead athletic directors, so they don't take the initiative to change it. And there are enough old coaches who ran in the 1970s who still go around saying "when I was in high school, I had 18 dual meets during the season".

So when you talk about doing batch meets or simply a divisional meet before a league meet in order to lessen the strain on kids, they look at you like you got three heads.

When I got done coaching, I came out of it very jaded. Seemed like too many of the old timers and administrators cared more about their fragile egos than really looking out for their athletes.

I was able to manage it because I had a good team and we skipped the weekend invites and were able to tempo run the dual meets and still win. So we could fit in other training (long runs and race pace work) without burning out kids. Then still peak at the end of the year at counties, the league meet, sectionals, and states.

But I also had a couple of middling teams before and I saw what happens when you don't really have hard workouts and just race a lot; the runners stagnate and don't really learn the finer points of racing. And if you try to cram in workouts, the kids flame out.

My highschool team generally had 2 races a week. Generally, we'd tempo the race and have a workout immediately after, or even have a bit of a workout during the race. You'll be fine as long as you don't run too hard at the midweek races. I would ask your coach about tempoing the races and making sure you're getting the necessary workouts in. Best of luck.

lazyswine wrote:

Looking for some opinions here. My high school XC team has a meet every Tuesday and Saturday until state (mid november). Does that sound reasonable or like too much racing?

All thoughts welcome, trolls BTFO.

Isn't that what all XC teams do?

For most kids that is not too much. If it is for you the coach should adjust and hold you out of some.

This all true- Holmdel vet here- & makes Jersey xc strong but also I think higher than necessary levels of burnout & plateuing.

Ssfssfsdffzdfsfsdff wrote:

The issue is that if you race twice a week, you basically cant include any workouts, and races are not a good substitute for workouts.

That's not completely true, it really depends how they race and if they go all out every time or not. They can always practice surges, negative splits and other techniques which could all be a decent substitute for a workout.

You should be racing every day, meet or not. That's the only way to get better.