If the goal is to have a couple athletes survive the rigors and the remainder to get injured, then by all means. Most of the guys I knew in college that tried to press on their recovery days had quick gains followed by stress fractures.
He had us doing Double Threshold for past year. Now switching to “Gibby Training” starting tomorrow.
You don't understand Gibby training if you think it entails hard easy days. There is nothing hard about 6 minute pace for a guy who has run under 13. My understanding is Gibby will only take runners for who the 6 minute pace run would be a moderate run at the hardest. Some people can get used to a moderate effort every day and it starts to become easy. You can't get used to training hard every day.
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You don't understand Gibby training if you think it entails hard easy days. There is nothing hard about 6 minute pace for a guy who has run under 13. My understanding is Gibby will only take runners for who the 6 minute pace run would be a moderate run at the hardest. Some people can get used to a moderate effort every day and it starts to become easy. You can't get used to training hard every day.
I am curious how the pace adjusts for other members on the team, given that they are well behind Blanks. In interviews/podcasts it sounds like Graham does much of his training this season on his own now that Acer is not at Harvard.
But there has been a slightly negative slant on this thread I feel towards Gibby and the training that I want to push against. The training is hard, 100 miles in 6 days with workouts and steady mileage is NOT easy, but it is for a purpose. Gibby has stated that the purpose is to develop aerobic athletes. It happens that Gibby's training aligns very well with Graham's strengths and attitude. Graham is an incredibly dedicated runner too, he took a gap year after high school and was training with the team in Flagstaff during it. I do not know how much "growing pain" there was in adapting Graham to the system, as Graham said his high school training was not like Gibby's, but it evidently worked out.
I don't know exactly how you "scale this down" for a high school setting or for slower runners but I would think it should be a little more sophisticated than just adjusting paces. Gibby is an NCAA coach so his system needs to be effective for 10k cross country. 100 miles seems to be a mileage target for many NCAA xc programs but it also seems like a lot of his "big workouts" are tailored specifically to replicating the scenarios in NCAA cross. In the most recent podcast with Graham, he gave the specific workouts but most involve some variation of a fast rep (1k or 800) and then steady efforts and finally a fast rep. Again, this is a specific workout done to prepare for NCAA cross. It is not a regular occurrence to do work this hard.
But someone already hit on the toughest method with adapting this training: we are not there! I have been piecing together all my information from podcasts and interviews. You can look at Graham's strava as well but this is just an outsider perspective. The specifics are crucial for this type of training. What does Gibby do when someone is falling off in their training? What does he look for on the workout days? How does he organize the groups behind Graham and when does he cut them off? You'd have to be there to know all of this and without that information you are missing key components.
What school is this? This sounds like a horrible, irresponsible coach if he just jumps everyone into the newest fad he happened to notice on Reddit or LR month after month, year after year.
No it isn’t advisable. Sometimes you can get lucky with a qualitative approach, but eventually you will crash, burn, and be sidelined from serious injury. Tell your coach he’s an idiot and to use his brain for once rather than just following the training fad that the latest fast guy is doing. Gibby seems really off as a person. I don’t think he cares whether his team gets hurt or not so long as a few of them run well. Blanks was lucky to bounce back quickly after being on crutches. Ramsden stayed healthy. There’s been others with injuries though.
Gibby training in his easy days are fast? 6:00/mile is not fast for a 12:59 guy. Its the same basically as a 15:40 guys running around 7:00/mile. Sometimes you will have to run slower to recover from a race or workout.
He had us doing Double Threshold for past year. Now switching to “Gibby Training” starting tomorrow.
You don't understand Gibby training if you think it entails hard easy days. There is nothing hard about 6 minute pace for a guy who has run under 13. My understanding is Gibby will only take runners for who the 6 minute pace run would be a moderate run at the hardest. Some people can get used to a moderate effort every day and it starts to become easy. You can't get used to training hard every day.
It’s just interesting to me that outside the American collegiate system, almost no successful runner ever runs hard every day. The Kenyans and Ethiopians almost always alternate hard and easy days. You can check the training logs of Geb, Tergat, Bekele and countless others. Geb’s Sunday run was at a snail pace for three hours. Same with Bekele. Jakob uses a periodization approach, and even after his high build up and adding double thresholds, he still takes some days easy. Viren and almost every Lydiard disciple never ran hard two days in a row. Almost all the most accomplished Olympic medalists alternated easy days.
The six minute pace or faster approach used by Arkansas coach John McDonell and countless McDonnell clones is a meat grinder approach where a handful of runners get really good for a time while the rest get injured. And even the studs like Allistar Cragg get hurt and sidelined eventually. Nobody can sustain hard running every day for more than a couple years. Look what happened to Chris Solinsky and Chris Derrick. They can barely jog, they’ve been practically crippled.
There’s just a few exceptions. Jonesy was out the door at sub 5 pace. His 2:07 could have been minutes faster in today’s super shoe era. He had a fairly long career, pretty durable despite running hard daily. Then there’s Seb Coe, but it’s important to note that Coe missed all of the 1983 season from a blood disorder undoubtedly caused by Peter Coe’s insane quality approach. You can’t argue with the rest of Coes career though. Sydney Marree ran hard every day too and it looks like from his training logs that El G did.
- coach gave everyone Coros GPS watches today. He will have master access to our uploads. Says he doesn’t want to see below 145hr on any run (only exception is warm up for workouts).
i assume it's a troll thread, but I have no doubt that this is happening somewhere, right now, in real life.
The fact of the matter is that more high school kids run their mileage too fast than too slow. It's a terrible philosophy for most high school kids.
But it's not a terrible philosophy for all runners. As you develop, you should always be looking to progress something. More miles, less rest, faster pace. Galen Rupp and Mo Farah made big gains by going to fast paces on their "easy days." but they were seasoned runners, running high mileage already. the next direction to advance was faster easy days.
He had us doing Double Threshold for past year. Now switching to “Gibby Training” starting tomorrow.
You don't understand Gibby training if you think it entails hard easy days. There is nothing hard about 6 minute pace for a guy who has run under 13. My understanding is Gibby will only take runners for who the 6 minute pace run would be a moderate run at the hardest. Some people can get used to a moderate effort every day and it starts to become easy. You can't get used to training hard every day.
No, he suggests everyone run 5:50-6:10 on easy days if they are on the mens team regardless of if they are 12:59 or guys who struggle to break 15:00.
Even the slowest guys on the team will end up doing 17mi long runs at 5:50 and then proceed to run 15:10 on the track.
You can adapt to running 6:00s without actually getting faster at the races you’re trying to race.
He had us doing Double Threshold for past year. Now switching to “Gibby Training” starting tomorrow.
Runners and coaches need to understand something.
Graham is not running 6:00 pace every run because he has to. He runs 6:00 pace because running 'easy' for him is anywhere between 5:30 and 6:04. So, if you're a 4:20 miler, you're Easy/Maintenance Pace is 6:17-6:56. But those paces vary from day to day. If you really want a deep understanding of his training, go read Jack Daniels, do that periodization to peak at the right time, do big singles, and long tempos.
He is the best in the NCAA because his training is by far the most mentally and physically challenging, but he came out on the other side of it.
Hard easy for everyone? I predict muscle fatigue and some injuries are going to occur. Easy days are for maintaining fitness with active recovery after hard workouts.
Regardless of whether this started as a troll thread (it almost certainly did), it actually developed into a good training discussion. Let's keep that going.
At the bottom of page two, I'd agree with the 9/10 rating.
Now, can we go for the grand slam 10/10? Harvard guys/gals, are you out there? We need you to weigh in with boots on the ground real info. Especially some answers to the questions posed earlier in the thread about how Gibby manages paces and workouts for the rest of the team.