Agree with the part about working max speed on LR days. Not all private coaches are evil tho! In fact, most uneducated high school coaches are far more harmful and the reason most talent in the US does not develop well
Agree with the part about working max speed on LR days. Not all private coaches are evil tho! In fact, most uneducated high school coaches are far more harmful and the reason most talent in the US does not develop well
Actually overtraining, not undertraining is the culprit.
Historically sub 4 high school milers have not go on to have very good pro careers because they were burned out and not prepared for the long term.
Grant Fisher won foot lockers off of 40 miles per week.
His high school coach was doing fine, he ran 4:28 and 2:01 as a freshman. I think it's scary now that every decent high school athlete is getting DM'd by dozens of private coaches looking to make a buck.
His 4:28 barely puts him in the top 100 freshmen nationwide. If you fail to recognize that reality, it's likely you aren't anymore qualified to coach him than his high school coaches are.
His point was that he ran 4:28 on next to no mileage as a freshman without the other kind of drills and exercises that usually go along with fine performances, and that he has responded enormously well to the increased mileage, workouts, and other work this year. I don't see this coach as harming the athlete. However, he is making several mistakes, too long and hard a tempo (5:26 for 30 minutes already for someone who was just running 2-3 miles per day last year?) and upping the workout counts too high. Doing top speed on long run day is not going to give great benefits to either and risks injury. Dial everything back. At least you are not giving him frequent high speed work at this point in the season.
You are a scum bag who is ruining this athlete. It was really sketchy for you to contact this athlete and poach him.
You are overtraining him. Too big a jump in both volume and intensity. You are more concerned with getting famous from this athlete than you are about his long term success.
I believe in the athlete but I don't believe in you as a coach. He's better off without you.
I actually agree. This coach has no idea what he's doing. Doing max speed on long run day depletes the purpose of both. You have this athlete doing almost 50% of total volume at workout effort pace, that's suicidal.
30 min tempo is too long for a sophomore at that training age. As is the 60 min at 6:15 and 14x400. What's on the plate for next year? 80 min at 5:50 and 21x400?
I have no respect for private coaches stealing athletes from high schools. Especially unqualified coaches such as yourself.
I don't know if I would go as far as scum bag, but as a head high school track coach for quite a while now I've had dealings with private coaches like this over the years and they all seem to come out of the same mold: only interested in working with the top talent and only interested in getting paid for it. I'm not a distance coach but it seems like it's mostly private distance coaches that pull this stuff. They have no problem bad mouthing the local high school coaches, but I've approached several of these types of coaches over the years to try to get them to coach our distance squad and cross country teams for our school (which are paid positions mind you, though admittedly not a lot) and they have no interest in it. No interest in giving a little back to the sport or coaching the unwashed masses I guess.
Meanwhile we have this poor kid, who may not have even reached his 16th birthday yet, running 40 miles per week over the winter while doing speed work when he should probably be playing basketball or wrestling or doing something else. Maybe this kid is the next Jim Ryun or maybe he'll never break 4:20, hopefully either way he doesn't regret too badly his lost youth. Hopefully his parents aren't too disappointed if he doesn't reach the promised times with what they are probably paying. Which leads me to my last point: bragging about a kid's times before he's even run them...don't. When you've spent even a modicum of time working with teenagers you realize the vast majority of talented kids never reach their potential for a wide variety of reasons, coaching is only one of them.
These stories about guys running super low mileage and being successful are few and far between. We are in a sport where the stopwatch doesn't lie and to get the necessary results most of us have to work extremely hard with no guarantee of success.
These stories about guys running super low mileage and being successful are few and far between. We are in a sport where the stopwatch doesn't lie and to get the necessary results most of us have to work extremely hard with no guarantee of success.
People stress too much over mileage. It is the 3 hard track workouts tends to be what gets you😁 sure when you are talking about 60+ mileage starts to matter. 40-60min/day? Not so much.
I actually agree. This coach has no idea what he's doing. Doing max speed on long run day depletes the purpose of both. You have this athlete doing almost 50% of total volume at workout effort pace, that's suicidal.
30 min tempo is too long for a sophomore at that training age. As is the 60 min at 6:15 and 14x400. What's on the plate for next year? 80 min at 5:50 and 21x400?
I have no respect for private coaches stealing athletes from high schools. Especially unqualified coaches such as yourself.
I don't know if I would go as far as scum bag, but as a head high school track coach for quite a while now I've had dealings with private coaches like this over the years and they all seem to come out of the same mold: only interested in working with the top talent and only interested in getting paid for it. I'm not a distance coach but it seems like it's mostly private distance coaches that pull this stuff. They have no problem bad mouthing the local high school coaches, but I've approached several of these types of coaches over the years to try to get them to coach our distance squad and cross country teams for our school (which are paid positions mind you, though admittedly not a lot) and they have no interest in it. No interest in giving a little back to the sport or coaching the unwashed masses I guess.
Meanwhile we have this poor kid, who may not have even reached his 16th birthday yet, running 40 miles per week over the winter while doing speed work when he should probably be playing basketball or wrestling or doing something else. Maybe this kid is the next Jim Ryun or maybe he'll never break 4:20, hopefully either way he doesn't regret too badly his lost youth. Hopefully his parents aren't too disappointed if he doesn't reach the promised times with what they are probably paying. Which leads me to my last point: bragging about a kid's times before he's even run them...don't. When you've spent even a modicum of time working with teenagers you realize the vast majority of talented kids never reach their potential for a wide variety of reasons, coaching is only one of them.
I have no way of proving this as I have already stated I am going to attempt to maintain anonymity, but I'm not going to let these posts slide. I work with 2 girls who are over 6 for the mile and 4 boys who are over 5 for the mile. I work with 11 people total. And I also do not get paid - I do this for fun. I'm 20 with disposable income (paid internship). I started working with these kids at the school because our school SUCKS at running and developing runners, and because I was the pretty much the only guy there in the last 15 years who ran well and I had to do that by coaching myself. I have no way of proving this, believe it if you will or won't.
Anyways, here is the infrequent update that I promised:
He missed 9 days shortly after I posted this due to mild Metatarsalgia. Blame me if you want (and I apportion some blame to myself) but he also told me afterwards that he had been training in some vaporflies that he had gotten for Christmas and not his usual shoe for the last week prior to his foot inflammation. Lesson learned, if it ain't broke don't fix it. He switched back to the usual shoe and has been fine since. He cross trained a little in the pool and kept up with core work.
I decided to ease him back into it and ultimately push back the late January race. We had him slated to run a 1k at a low key polar bear meet but scratched and decided it would be better to race or find a time trial a week or two after the initial race date. We looked but found no nearby meets the week beginning the 6th that worked with his schedule, so we settled on a solo 1600m time trial on February 9th (plus some easy-ish 400s after ala the OAC post mile threshold 2ks).
The first week and a half back in mid January I had him do entirely easy runs except for one unstructured fartlek and one moderate cutdown long run (70 mins averaged 6:50 or so)
The week of January 23rd we started back with the two workout a week and easy long run structure, he did a 24:05 tempo @ 5:29 pace (our hilliest tempo route) & 7x1k on trail with 90 seconds recovery averaging 3:04. he didn't feel great before this one so I told him to see how the first 3 felt at 3:05 and we could cut it if it wasn't going well, but he loosened up and closed the workout in a smooth 2:58
The week of January 30th he did 6x820m hill with jog down recovery where he averaged 2:50. I have no idea what the gradient is but I did this workout averaging 2:58 a couple of months out from a 4:01 1500. It's more of an on/off tempo because the we don't take the jog down slow, we get back down in about the same time we go up. The second workout was 5x1200m on the track with 2 minutes recovery and he averaged 3:38.
This week on Tuesday he did 13x1 steep one minute hill with jog down recovery, won't bother going into details for it beyond that, but the moment of truth was the 1600m time trial today. We were blessed to have some non-freezing rain type of weather in our area this week and conditions were great today.
He ran 4:21.9 with nobody but me and the stopwatch on the track. 63, 70, 67, 61-62 depending on the hundredths. He was beyond ecstatic which was great to see. Did 6x400 after just for a little more volume in 70 down to 60 and called it a day. Keep in mind he hasn't actually touched anything faster than 70/400 yet.
Now that we're approaching outdoor, here is what I've got planned for the next few weeks:
3x(4x400) on 1 min rep 3 min set shooting for roughly 65-66
6x800 on 90 rec shooting for roughly 2:18-2:20
1k-800-600-600-400-400 on 200 or 300 jog recovery with no specific pace in mind but targeting working through the gears
20 minute tempo + 6x200 @ sub 30 with substantial rest to work on mechanics
^^ a bit of transitional work
He opens his outdoor season on March 3. I'm not too sure how much longer I can keep updating this before his times in official meets will make anonymity impossible, but that was January, and I'm sure I will be able to provide an update for February before racing starts.
Your athlete obviously has talent! Have you read "800 and 1500 meter racing and training" by Peter Coe and David Martin? They have 2 books on the subject, if you haven't read them, then you need too, as soon as possible!! They give in full detail how to build a yearly program. Which includes weight training and how to integrate into the running workouts. Read, read, read!
The next thing you need to do is to determine which type of training your runner responds best too. Obviously he should do a variety of workouts, which you seem to have a good enough knowledge of for now. The real question is how to proportion the workouts. How many weeks doing aerobic, how many weeks doing threshold, and threshold intervals, then how many weeks of short speed. Another thing you need to learn is what taper works best for your athlete, you need to experiment with that.
This will take time to learn, and that is what only you and your athlete can determine!! Not people who don't know your athlete, nor see him in his workouts, and do not talk with him directly. Only you and your athlete will be, or should be responsible for his success or failure.
Everything is about feedback, and one of the best feedback tools available are the smartwatches. You should be building a database of info for things like, what's his heartrate at easy paces when rested, verse easy pace after months of hard training, it won't be the same. This will become valuable overtime as it shows when he is becoming over trained, or under trained. Seeing continued development is about providing the best balance of stimulus. I do believe a lot of training can be done by feel, but that takes time also. The real benefit of the watches is as a feedback tool.
Lastly, I would stop posting about him and his training, you need to explain to him that you don't know everything you need to yet, but that you are committed to him, and that in time you will learn!
Personally I would chill with the longer threshold stuff. Even if it doesn't seem like it he's going to hammer those sessions faster than necessary. Can get the same stimulus doing cruise intervals on short rest.
Your athlete obviously has talent! Have you read "800 and 1500 meter racing and training" by Peter Coe and David Martin? They have 2 books on the subject, if you haven't read them, then you need too, as soon as possible!! They give in full detail how to build a yearly program. Which includes weight training and how to integrate into the running workouts. Read, read, read!
The next thing you need to do is to determine which type of training your runner responds best too. Obviously he should do a variety of workouts, which you seem to have a good enough knowledge of for now. The real question is how to proportion the workouts. How many weeks doing aerobic, how many weeks doing threshold, and threshold intervals, then how many weeks of short speed. Another thing you need to learn is what taper works best for your athlete, you need to experiment with that.
This will take time to learn, and that is what only you and your athlete can determine!! Not people who don't know your athlete, nor see him in his workouts, and do not talk with him directly. Only you and your athlete will be, or should be responsible for his success or failure.
Everything is about feedback, and one of the best feedback tools available are the smartwatches. You should be building a database of info for things like, what's his heartrate at easy paces when rested, verse easy pace after months of hard training, it won't be the same. This will become valuable overtime as it shows when he is becoming over trained, or under trained. Seeing continued development is about providing the best balance of stimulus. I do believe a lot of training can be done by feel, but that takes time also. The real benefit of the watches is as a feedback tool.
Lastly, I would stop posting about him and his training, you need to explain to him that you don't know everything you need to yet, but that you are committed to him, and that in time you will learn!
Best of luck!
Thank you for the wonderful advice. I have not had the chance to read that specific book yet, I’ve mostly just scoured the internet and read Daniel’s, but that does sound like a valuable resource. I’ll check it out.
He does have a smartwatch but honestly we don’t read too much into the metrics of it - on easy days he just goes by feel and it is anywhere from 7:10 to 8:10 for the most part.
We are definitely still experimenting - he’s done a lot of aerobic stuff but I’m going to use this season to hit some speed endurance stuff and see how he responds to that. He has clearly responded to the aerobic training but I want him to peak really hard off this base phase and continue to develop that speed. As you saw in the base phase we mixed it up with various length hills, tempos, steady states, and some 800-1200 intervals. As we get to March I’m gonna see how he responds to things like some quick 2’s and 3’s after an aerobic stimulus.
At the end of the day I probably should stop posting here but it’s something I’m conflicted about because I do want to continue to get great feedback from people like you and also document his training for anyone in the future who stumbles upon this.
I have no way of proving this as I have already stated I am going to attempt to maintain anonymity, but I'm not going to let these posts slide. I work with 2 girls who are over 6 for the mile and 4 boys who are over 5 for the mile. I work with 11 people total. And I also do not get paid - I do this for fun. I'm 20 with disposable income (paid internship). I started working with these kids at the school because our school SUCKS at running and developing runners, and because I was the pretty much the only guy there in the last 15 years who ran well and I had to do that by coaching myself. I have no way of proving this, believe it if you will or won't.
Anyways, here is the infrequent update that I promised:
He missed 9 days shortly after I posted this due to mild Metatarsalgia. Blame me if you want (and I apportion some blame to myself) but he also told me afterwards that he had been training in some vaporflies that he had gotten for Christmas and not his usual shoe for the last week prior to his foot inflammation. Lesson learned, if it ain't broke don't fix it. He switched back to the usual shoe and has been fine since. He cross trained a little in the pool and kept up with core work.
I decided to ease him back into it and ultimately push back the late January race. We had him slated to run a 1k at a low key polar bear meet but scratched and decided it would be better to race or find a time trial a week or two after the initial race date. We looked but found no nearby meets the week beginning the 6th that worked with his schedule, so we settled on a solo 1600m time trial on February 9th (plus some easy-ish 400s after ala the OAC post mile threshold 2ks).
The first week and a half back in mid January I had him do entirely easy runs except for one unstructured fartlek and one moderate cutdown long run (70 mins averaged 6:50 or so)
The week of January 23rd we started back with the two workout a week and easy long run structure, he did a 24:05 tempo @ 5:29 pace (our hilliest tempo route) & 7x1k on trail with 90 seconds recovery averaging 3:04. he didn't feel great before this one so I told him to see how the first 3 felt at 3:05 and we could cut it if it wasn't going well, but he loosened up and closed the workout in a smooth 2:58
The week of January 30th he did 6x820m hill with jog down recovery where he averaged 2:50. I have no idea what the gradient is but I did this workout averaging 2:58 a couple of months out from a 4:01 1500. It's more of an on/off tempo because the we don't take the jog down slow, we get back down in about the same time we go up. The second workout was 5x1200m on the track with 2 minutes recovery and he averaged 3:38.
This week on Tuesday he did 13x1 steep one minute hill with jog down recovery, won't bother going into details for it beyond that, but the moment of truth was the 1600m time trial today. We were blessed to have some non-freezing rain type of weather in our area this week and conditions were great today.
He ran 4:21.9 with nobody but me and the stopwatch on the track. 63, 70, 67, 61-62 depending on the hundredths. He was beyond ecstatic which was great to see. Did 6x400 after just for a little more volume in 70 down to 60 and called it a day. Keep in mind he hasn't actually touched anything faster than 70/400 yet.
Now that we're approaching outdoor, here is what I've got planned for the next few weeks:
3x(4x400) on 1 min rep 3 min set shooting for roughly 65-66
6x800 on 90 rec shooting for roughly 2:18-2:20
1k-800-600-600-400-400 on 200 or 300 jog recovery with no specific pace in mind but targeting working through the gears
20 minute tempo + 6x200 @ sub 30 with substantial rest to work on mechanics
^^ a bit of transitional work
He opens his outdoor season on March 3. I'm not too sure how much longer I can keep updating this before his times in official meets will make anonymity impossible, but that was January, and I'm sure I will be able to provide an update for February before racing starts.
You already injured this kid once. Your workouts are trash and are too much for this kid. No need to do 6x400 after a huge PR for a sophomore.
I think you are really keeping his name anonymous because YOU want ALL the credit. You see him as the Drew Hunter to your Tinman. But the truth is he ran 4:28 without you and he would have run 4:21 without you. If he does run sub 4:10 this year then he could have also done it without you.
And exactly who are you anonymous poster so qualified to determine that 25 minute tempos, 1k repeats and hills are trash? The 6x400 was also relatively easy. He went like 70 69 69 65 64 61 on a 3 minute cycle. It was really just for a bit of turnover. Have you never doubled at a meet before? You seem obvious.
At the end of the day we don’t know what the cause was for his injury - it could have been the shoes or 40mpw or any other thing really. Injuries happen. I stated that it could have been from my training or also this other obvious factor which would be the shoe change. I have gotten injured with the wrong shoe before.
If I wanted the credit, then who am I? Why haven’t I shared my name? Why did I explicitly put in the title that this kid is insanely talented and talk about his work ethic?
I agree that someone as talented as him will more than likely end up being fast, but there are too many talented kids out there with trash coaches like my high school’s. I know for a fact some of the kids I ran with in school were better than me but they listened to the coaches and ended up being 4:40 1600m runners and quitting. I am not proclaiming to be a genius, I started this thread to get feedback. I would also consider your post tunnel vision-y especially considering that he is running very well at the moment and had one 9 day hiccup in 4 months of good training.
Your welcome. I gave the heartrate as just one example. And I do like running by feel. Another great metric for tracking fatigue/freshness is cadence, which will slow as runners become really fatigued. So the best way to view this data is as a mirror, which is reflecting back to you and your runner how he is feeling at any point in time.
Also these data points from when a runner is fresh become of great value when tapering for a big race. A runner is not fully recovered until hr or cadence numbers are equal to or better than when the training block began.
This is why I strongly recommend building a database asap. You can setup a simple excel spreadsheet yourself. Not for every run, but once a week for easy runs, then any workouts, threshold, tempo, intervals, etc. Just have the dates running vertically, then the pace, distance, hr, cadence, stride length, going horizontal. Now you can compare 3 months, 1 year, or 3 years later. I guarantee that chart will be of immense help over time.
Do you live near a university or near a running club, where there might be an experienced coach? It may be helpful to have someone to confer with, or who might be able to see an occasional workout. Simply observing a runner doing a workout can be really helpful.
Peter Coe said that when Seb was young he had a feeling he might just have a "world beater". So early on he estimated what the world record in the 800m would be in 10 years. He then setup a training program designed to beat that time, 10 years later. Think long term, maybe not ten years, but senior year of hs, and or college. It's really not that important what he runs this year, it's about developing the plan for long term success!!
Your welcome. I gave the heartrate as just one example. And I do like running by feel. Another great metric for tracking fatigue/freshness is cadence, which will slow as runners become really fatigued. So the best way to view this data is as a mirror, which is reflecting back to you and your runner how he is feeling at any point in time.
Also these data points from when a runner is fresh become of great value when tapering for a big race. A runner is not fully recovered until hr or cadence numbers are equal to or better than when the training block began.
This is why I strongly recommend building a database asap. You can setup a simple excel spreadsheet yourself. Not for every run, but once a week for easy runs, then any workouts, threshold, tempo, intervals, etc. Just have the dates running vertically, then the pace, distance, hr, cadence, stride length, going horizontal. Now you can compare 3 months, 1 year, or 3 years later. I guarantee that chart will be of immense help over time.
Do you live near a university or near a running club, where there might be an experienced coach? It may be helpful to have someone to confer with, or who might be able to see an occasional workout. Simply observing a runner doing a workout can be really helpful.
Peter Coe said that when Seb was young he had a feeling he might just have a "world beater". So early on he estimated what the world record in the 800m would be in 10 years. He then setup a training program designed to beat that time, 10 years later. Think long term, maybe not ten years, but senior year of hs, and or college. It's really not that important what he runs this year, it's about developing the plan for long term success!!
I prefer the OP's Intuitive approach to your formulaic recommendation.
An intuitive coach already knows those numbers anyway and how to adjust them when required.
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