Coaches, do you have any tips to help someone who excels in practice but chokes in every race?

A lot of people are suggesting that the kid is running too hard in practice and leaves nothing for his races. That may be true but I always wonder about that explanation when you've got a repeating situation.

Assume a Saturday race and some sort of workouts on Wednesday and Monday. The kid kills the two workouts and flames out in the race THEN he's back the following Monday and Wednesday killing the workouts again. If he really wasted himself running the workouts too hard you would expect that he'd eventually start to struggle with the workouts. Maybe that will eventually happen. Maybe he's digging deeper and deeper to run those great workouts and will eventually bottom out in training too. If that's the case the obvious answer is to restrict his workouts, maybe just have him do half of what the rest of the team is doing and then go jog easily for the rest of the time or even not let him do them at all and jog easily while everyone else does the sessions.

But I think you've got a mental issue and those are much tougher to resolve. I have sometimes dealt with things like that by giving tasks to accomplish in races that have nothing to do with the final result, e.g., say I have an athlete who goes out too hard all the time and then dies. I might send him into a race with the goal of running each mile faster than the previous one and calling it a success if he manages that no matter how fast or slow the end result is.

new coach wrote:

We ran a 10x400 workout (5 sets of 2, 1 min rest between, 2 min between sets) on grass a few weeks back. He averaged 1:20 or 1:21 overall. (1:18-1:24 throughout, and last one was 1:14 or something). He only runs in the high 19s for a 5K though. Makes no sense. I think the kid has potential though. He might need better endurance?

You can't tell that much from a 400 workout. I used to get murdered in 400 workouts by a few teammates in high school, and then they couldn't finish within a minute and a half of me in a 5,000.

There's a guy on my son's HS team who runs the 400 and 300 hurdles in track. He runs in the 21s in CC, but when it's 400 workout day, he smokes them all, especially on the last all-out one. He just isn't a distance runner.

Two things:

1) If you're not doing this already, make sure you tell the team how fast they are supposed to be running. Include subjective descriptions of how it should feel and be clear that you're giving them a range to hit, not one definite pace. Otherwise your athletes' intuition might tell them that to improve they have to work hard, which means making it hurt in practice. Yes, you do have to work hard, but the ball buster workouts should be few.

2) Another possibility could be that this guy is extremely slow twitch. He has good endurance, recovers quickly, etc. He can approach "top speed" more easily and often. But since he has a weak top gear it's difficult to go much faster. If that's the case he might need to work on that speed. Maybe for him it's like trying to run 5:30 pace for 5k when his mile is 5:15. Just ain't gonna happen.

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