Rojo's Article

deleuze wrote:

Wow, this thread is a disappointment.

Must be a pretty good article if the only criticism that can be applied is the ad hominem.

I agree. I really liked the article and the number one thing people say is we need more training articles. Then instead of getting a discussion of the article we get a few people posting over and over on how it sucks with ad hominem attacks.

The best part of owning the site is seeing the ip addresses of the posts. The ones from rival schools are the best.

I think one of the best things of the John Kellogg style of training is it gets people to peak at the right time and is repeatable.

There are 2 factors that determine how good you are on any day:

1) Your absolute max ability

2) How close you come to #1 on the day it matters.

I think JK's training does an outstanding job with #2. For me, it was my key to success. On the big scale of things I wasn't that great of a runner, but I take a ton of pride in the Meb, Abdi, Culpepper era at 10k I got 4th at Nationals twice. Now a discussion of "talent" is too complicated to get into here, but I wouldn't say I was the guy who everyone would pick to finish right behind those guys (I didn't break 30 minutes for 10k until I was 24 or 25 years old). People ran a lot faster than me each year early in the season but not at nationals when it mattered.

I think Rojo's guys have done a fabulous job at peaking when it matters. Yes he has no conference titles in XC but his guys have cleaned up on the track. If they gave a conference title for distance runners in track, his runners would have it I'm not sure how many of the X number of last years. Each year also, if you go off of descending order lists heading into the conference meet, they do way better than expected. I think that shows a good ability to peak when it matters and indicates the training is repeatable.

I hate to say it but can someone post the link to the article please. For some odd reason I cant find it and from the posts it sounds like a great read.

Great article, I think Robert is spot on. Keep posting stuff like this.

dsrunner has the day off wrote:

I don't have any qualms with the brothers hyping Cornell or mega-mileage. My real issue is with the rigid black and white thinking about training they seem to promote.

Hopefully some of the coaches who speak up will continue balancing out the presentation.

I think my views on training are misunderstood. I had a guy in my top 5 once that ran less than 50mpw. I'm not rigid in my training.

The whole point of Training talk is to get lots of ideas about training out there. In future, episodes, I hope to talk to other top coaches. It just happens that I'd start with JK and myself.

lastly, I certainly don't hype Cornell on this site. I don't think I hype mega mileage either. I have very few kids on my team that average anywhere near 80mpw.

I certainly believe in what we do here but the point of this site and this series is to share ideas.

front page

http://www.letsrun.com/2009/training1209.php

great article, and definitely something i'd appreciate getting more of on this site. don't be discouraged by the junk on this thread-- some of us actually take some time to think and reflect after we read, rather than immediately signing on to register our knee-jerk reactions.

i find the passages on goal-setting to be especially fascinating. i know i've been guilty of setting an unrealistic goal and then sabotaging a race by "going for it," i.e. going out at a pace that basically guaranteed i'd limp home over the last third of the race. this is probably the toughest thing to explain to a high school athlete (and even some in college): you don't get any points for "going for it" or even for setting a goal. all that matters is what you actually do.

I have always be under the impression that one can take alittle from each coach and use it to better themselves, I will take this from rojo, "relaxed is fast", definitely a classic, good article and look forward to more training talk on this running forum (sometimes we forget this is a running forum!!!)

Money where the mouth is wrote:

gfsdgsdf wrote:

He has been at cornell long enough to give us stats (how many people improve year over year, how many regress, how many burn out,...). Is it better than let say old school arkansas (lots of hard fast miles if the training plans I have read are right)?

To make accurate comparisons would mean looking at scads of incoming freshman runners

...

Improvement isn't that simple. If it were just an equation, everybody would get better. A coach could be successful if he has a runner who hardly improves at all, but performs well at the right time of year. A 4:05 HS runner could have won IC4As in the indoor mile last year had he ran only one second faster at the right time. That's improvement too.

***

I loved the article. I thought it was fantastic. Keep 'em coming, brojos!

Simply put: Your views are not misuderstood, but are anonymously and unfairly dissected with false accusations and deceitful motives. I read the article and thought it was one of the (truly) most informative pieces on training I've seen on this site in a long time. What is interesting is that the critique some folks have about the article was actually noted continuously throughout the piece to avoid negative backlashes. It obviously wasn't enough. I appreciated the article and look for more to come; the article actually helped validate that I'm currently doing the proper training myself. I particularly like the piece about mind-body connection: running relaxed = fast VS running fast = painful. No mention of pace, as it is another individually based number.

My 2 cents.

I'm happy to speak in defense of the principles Rojo espouses, and behind them, the training wisdom of John Kellogg. I have no idea whether they work for HS and collegiate runners, but they sure as hell work for a masters returnee to racing like me.

I've intermingled JK's ideas, to be sure, with those of Tinman (whose forum I haunt from time to time) and Brad Hudson. All the basic principles--slow, steady increase in base mileage; learning steady state & threshold paces and letting them "come to you"; limiting killer workouts to particular moments in the training cycle; strides; and, above, all, running as slowly as needed on recovery days--have worked for me. I just notched my master's half-marathon PR (1:31:03) at age 51. I notched my 10K PR (40:42 one week after a 40:43) this past spring. I'm getting faster, not slower, and I've steadily lowered my times over the past 6 years. I've had the occasional injury, but I've also learned how to back off in time to avoid injuries.

I train hard, and on occasion very hard, within the 45-50 mpw limits I've established, but I rarely overtrain and I'm able to go back and see, on those rare occasions, just what happened.

It's a great article, Rojo. Everything in it rings true to my experience of the past six years. I'm just an average grandmaster schmo, trying to maximize what little talent I've got, but I'll always be grateful for the help that this website, and JK, provided (especially JK's chapter in Kevin Beck's RUN STRONG), and I'm glad you're carrying the torch.

For what it's worth, I run all my recovery runs at paces that range from 3:00 to 4:00 a mile slower than my 10K race pace (i.e., between 9:30 and 10:30 pace, with slower paces coming in the summer months). Here I'm hearkening back to Van Aaken and his idea about "storing up energy" during LSD runs. It never ceases to amaze me the way in which some younger runners think they need to be competitive during "recovery" runs. Here, too, JK helped me understand that if you want to show up on race day both uninjured and with something deep in the well to draw on, you need to put something in the well--which means allowing true recovery to take place, rather than carrying partial recovery through the entire training cycle.

I appreciate the article and think that the Brojo's are certainly tremendous asset to the sport.

(Side note: I think it is total B.S. to say that Webb, arguably the most competitive/successful U.S. athlete of the last decade, is/was not training properly, but Cornell athlete ????? has training better because he was more consistent. Even after compensating for the talent disparity, no athlete would be more satisified with ??????? career than Webb's. Webb could smoke that kid running backwards with a piano on his back in any distance. It is just not a reasonable argument. Give me an insane PR for my talent once and I'd retire a happy runner. I dont want 4th at Heps.)

I am not a huge fan of the training philosophy here.

Primarily because I know, literally, dozens of runners of all talent levels. From the 8:50 high school kids to 9:50 college kids who have logged tens of thousands of miles of slow running, with "hard days" that arent really that hard, two workouts a week, "Summer of Malmo" in the summer and they go no where in their 4 years of college.

To be fair, I known 2 or 3 who have done exactly that and have challenged for NCAA championships.

But the landscape of college track is littered with thousands of careers who have followed the "get your mileage in, strides, two workouts a week" and they havent gotten better. From what I have seen the ratio of people who have really progressed well beyond reasonable expectations to those who havent is maybe 1:20-50.

How can that be considered successful? If physiologically this is the way to do it, what happens to the thousands of kids that this doesnt work for? The vast majority of NCAA runners train this way. So why dont we churn out hundreds of 13:30 guys? why does German Fern. run 13:30 on 1/1000 the lifetime mileage of Ryan Hall? Because slow running and mileage mean next to nothing. Note Dean K.

I agree recovery mileage can be run slow, but not because of increased capillarization at slower speeds but because recvoery runnign will never help you run faster at the end of a season. Recovery running is something to do because you cant run hard every day. No article on training should center on recovery runs.

Caveat: I have never coached a single athlete.

i agree that a program shouldnt be based on slow running and that only fast running is the main ingredient to getting faster. however, without recovery, fast running is deterred...

hill city wrote:

I guess I'm on rojo's side as far as the intensity of the everyday mileage. I think it's way more important to "learn" to run easy...and include as much of this easy running as you can in a HS program. Obviously, the "easy" pace will get faster as your running economy at "easy pace" gets better, but it always baffles me that there are HS kids doing all of their mileage around 6 min/mile pace...

When you have learned to run easy on the easy days, you are much more consitent, rarely having a "bad" race or workout. Why? Because you're always feeling pretty decent week-to-week, month-to-month and year-to-year. Consistency is what makes good runners great. Awfully hard to train when you're injured, run down or mentally drained from running too hard, too often.

.

I should clarify my point. I believe that you get, "more bang for your buck" from steady state running than just about any other pace. Many kids confuse steady state with tempo pace. When I say that I want my athtletes to learn to run at steady state pace, I also mean that I want them to learn not to run too hard as well as not running too easy.

I don't know what kind of kids most of the rest of you coach (if you coach HS), but mine (mostly), left to their own devices will undertrain. My varsity boys will often trot along at 9:00 mile pace (or dick around and walk)because they think that is what easy running should be. It is difficult for me to get kids to not stop during their distance runs....even some of the better ones. If I have a beginner, who is running a 2 mile time trial in 14 minutes, I would much rather have him spend the early season teaching him to run 2.5-2.5 miles comfortably at 7:45-8:00 pace than send him out on a 6 or 7 miler where I know he will walk or trot along at 10:00 pace.

I used to follow the CW of trying to get as many easy miles on my kids legs as I could. This year was the first year that I drastically reduced the distance that my young runners (and the varsity to some extent) were doing. This year my freshman team went undefeated and won our section meet with 18 points. They suffered very few injuries and raced consistantly well all season. When they run steady pace, they truly run steady pace. Most of them were running somewhere in the 7:00-7:30 pace range on their steady runs (about 1 minute per mile slower than their 2 mile RP, but I told them that they could run slower if they felt they needed to.

As they get more mature, we will add in miles. However, I don't see any of these freshman kids (with the exception of one that I had pulled up to varisty) ever running 70 mpw in HS. During the season, most of this group will (hopefully) top out in the mid 40s. They will certainly not do steady state runs every day. Many of the miles that we add in later will be easy/recovery miles.

I will keep updating on the progress of my runners. Perhaps I will eat my words. We'll see.

How many years in a row did you run with ~48s of your 10k pr? Obviously the training worked and allowed you to have some great 10k races. But as an outsider looking in, your career doesn't look any more repeatable than Webbs. I am sure there are tons of details (injuries, no good races,....) but webb has those also.

This thread got me thinking: my boy's HS team this year ran a lot of mileage, solid but unspectacular interval workouts, but on their own, from love of running, ran way more "steady state" but mostly because they liked running 6:45 more than 7:45 pace. This team overachieved way beyond anything I would have imagined.

Girls team, more talented than the boys, ran similar workouts as the boys, but completely dropped the ball on mileage runs-jogged 10 minute pace. They bombed.

I chalked this up more to the personality of the teams: boys goofy and excited by running and racing this year, girls, uninspired and going through the motions of training like it was a homework assignment.

Now I am not so sure. Steady state might be a larger piece of the training puzzle than I thought.

Im from a "rival school" and I appreciated the article a ton. I hope there is more.

A couple things to start:

I run for Cornell, take that for what its worth.

I've improved a lot with Rojo's training, of course that will bias me to think it works.

So here's a couple things that I think people are missing:

1. Rojo's had some awful years recruiting up until recently. As great as 925-935 guys like me are, we almost never wind up as All-Americans under ANY program. Usually, we're just not that talented in the first place. Rojo has had a grand total of 1 recruit under 910 before this year. He was 15th at NCAAs in the Steeple last spring. Don't compare apples to oranges. Don't mix up recruiting and training.

2. Repeatability is key to any training program in ANYTHING. If you can't do it over and over again (and right most of the time) its pretty hard to get good at it. So, if you need to get caffeened up, adrenalined up, and run times at your limit (or past) to "get fit", you can't do that very often. If that is your bread and butter and you can't repeat it, you're not doing anything. The things you do every day or every week are the things that really make you improve.

3. Why doesn't this system produce Kenyan results? Look at the recent Renato Canova thread (I think thats where it is) where someone talks about the fact that HS runners ignore mileage and true base/aerobic work and concentrate on the short term rewards of VO2 Max work. If you give Kenyan guys basically no choice but to train aerobically from an early age, and compare them to guys who usually don't run into this kind of training until theyre 18 and in college, of course they'll be better. Usually giving someone an extra 5-7 years of base work in ANYTHING makes it pretty hard for others to catch up, especially when your biological clock is ticking to its peak.

4. Listen to the trainingtalk program. Yeah, its an hour. Yes, it has anecdotes about things that have happened at Cornell (including Nick Willis), because thats where much of his experience comes from.

The bottom line is, though:

Yes, it is even more compelling than the article.

To support my former teammates (and coach), I just wanted to say that Rojo's and JK's training helped me progress to a level in running that I didn't think I would achieve. Unlike my teammate Zac Hine, who was about a 4:17 guy in hs (under Rojos training he has run 8:06 3k, 14:10 5k, 29:09 10k, 60:48 20k, 48:40s for 10 miles) -I was a 4:30 miler coming out of high school...and I worked pretty hard in high school (training up to 70mpw).

Like Zac, I was also able to progress in cross country every season I ran at Cornell running the following times each year at VCP

27:16

25:26

24:59

24:41....where I placed 2nd in the Conference and qualified for NCAAs.

That same year Rojo even let me run a marathon because I wanted to qualify for the trials and under his guidance (and the strength gained from his past years of coaching) I was able to run a 2:21 at the age of 21.

When I was in high school, I didn't think I'd really be good enough to even run D-I as I never qualified for state in track or placed in the top 10 at states in xc.

I spent 5 years at Cornell and I've watched lots of my other teammate improve and progress with their running. Its not perfect, and there are always going to be some disappointments. In track for example, my seasons didn't always go so well. However, one has to remember that running is a fickle sport and while training is essential in reaching a peak performance, other lifestyle factors play a role. Other variables like lack of sleep (common at Cornell), a poor diet, and stress from academics or adjusting to Ithaca weather and hills can mess with your running.

Overall though, I was glad that I ran for a program where the coach cared about his runners, and would be genuinely interested in training them to improve towards their goals and dreams.