is my coach insane??? 20x200 workout

Awesome. What was your rest interval, if I may ask? Thank you!

I'm with gahagand. Twenty minute tempo beforehand and :32/200 makes this very tough.

notafatty, when you run "36" for a 200 is that 35.6 rounded up or 36.9 with the tenths cut off? If you averaged 33.0 you could say your workout was in the ballpark of the interval portion of the OP's workout, but you did not average 33 flat.

We do even 30x200 with 30" off, faster than mile pace, including a bit of tempo to get properly warmed up. Stop whining....

I used to do this workout too and it’s not as hard as it looks. Don’t be a wussy, you won’t get any ...medals.

And for those crying about he tempo run being too hard, stop whining. Both runs train different systems. As long as the tempo is ran at aerobic threshold you will be fine for the short intervals.

About 1 minute, 200 meter jog...

back in my high school days we did a few workouts of the same ilk:

32x200 in sets of 4 w/ 30 secs rest. a few mins recovery between sets. all 32 or faster, think I got down to 26 on the last one!

20x400 w/ 100m jog between reps/ 400m between sets. don't remember splits but I think I averaged somewhere around 78.

I ran around 4:35 and 10:00 that year.

I don't think that workout is beyond your abilities. However, as a coach now, I would not prescribe something like that to my athletes. With a 20 min tempo, I'd only add 6 or so 200s, but fast (more of a multi-pace training workout). If I wanted a speed endurance effect, which is what your coach seems to be going for, I'd cut the tempo and run the same volume but closer to mile pace in 300s or 400s. (14x300 or 10x400 instead of 20x200).

then again, we sometimes have loose definitions of tempo. do you normally "tempo" before track work, or is it usually its own session/ the "meat" part of the session? unless you're running heavy mileage for a high schooler, a true 20 min tempo is probably a fairly substantial workout for you.

1967 wrote:

We did this in early 1966 except it was 24 of them, with jogs straight across the field and right into the next one.

Yeah, ten years later, we were still doing the same workout in high school. Start line was center of the straightaway (same as races at the time), and coach stood with a stopwatch at the center of the back straight. Recovery was jogging across the football field 50-yard line back to the start.

I can't remember if it was 20 or 24 repeats. I was a 4:45ish miler, and the first few felt easy at 31 seconds. It was challenging to keep the rest of them at 32. I have no idea if the workout was beneficial or not.

12x440 was another tough workout, running them at 68 seconds (72 seconds was mile race pace). Recovery was about 50-yard walk, 50-yard jog -- up to the start of the curve and back.

20x200m was literally my first workout ever. Grade 8. This is not insane.

Not a lot of high schools in Delaware... probably 20-50% of high school distance coaches read letsrun. Brave move by op being that specific with location and pr.

SDSU Aztec wrote:

One of Ron Clarke's favorite workouts was 20 laps of sprinting the straightaways and jogging the turns. Sounds pretty similar.

This was on a horse track though.

tarckstar wrote:

We did 20x400.

Me too 20 x 400 all under 65 with 400m jog recovery that had to be SIB 2 minutes. If not you redid that 400m

over.

Some of the team paired up but me and Douglas 1:46 (800m) ran ours by ourselves neither redid any but all the paird runners did 1-2 over.

That is a pretty standard/classic workout. Nothing abnormal here unless your coach is asking you to go all-out on each 200.

We recently did a very similar workout, but it was a 'cut down' 16x200. I made the guys start with 4 at 38 sec which they laughed at, then did 4 in 36, then 4 in 32, then 4 in 30 (which they did not laugh at as much). Rest was a jog back across the diagonal of the field.

That's a perfectly fine workout a couple weeks before conference.

You're acting like it's a couple days before conference.

That's not bad at all. I did 5x4x200 with 1 min rest between reps, 5 min between sets and averaged 31, and I'm only a 4:44 miler. I could probably do this, it'd be harder than I should be going in training, but for you this seems like a reasonably solid session.

ITT: no one seeing that there's a 20 min tempo before the 200s

Good workout. Tempo seems a bit useless, I'd rather do 40 x 200 with no tempo beforhand.

OP

Are you under 30 years of age?

If so, knock the workout out, and shut up

It's not hard for anyone who is under 40.

My concern for a high school workout is whether it is high enough quality. as opposed to being a slog you can get through. But the workout is not insane - and it may work well for some.

I ran 4:09 for the mile decades ago in high school, with three other teammates under 4:12. We were very direct disciples of Igloi, but done appropriately at the high school level. We would obtain benefit from 8 X 200 at 28/29, along with 10 x 100 meter runs at explicitly variable speeds every 33 meters - 5/8, 7/8, back to 5/8, and the like - these kind of things really helped in racing. No walking in between intervals - and not much rest either.

I do think we should have run more mileage outside of the track intervals, but with one exception (a fifth man who ran 9:17 for two miles), none of us were really long distance runners, and likely needed to be pushed more than we were to do more miles than we did.