Buttfromaholeintheground wrote:
Ultimately, the biggest problem with this site is our niche keeps us from having a deep understanding of the other aspects of the sport. Distance runners don't understand sprinters and sprinters don't understand distance runners. If you have not done the different events at a high level it very difficult to understand how they fatigue a person equally even though the distances are on opposite ends of the spectrum.
Totally agree this is a problem (in both directions) with some athletes and coaches. I knew when I graduated college I wanted to be a more knowledgeable coach that a distance background alone would make me. I wanted to understand the sport.
I wasn't a stud distance guy in college, just good enough to make my D1 team as a walk on, but I knew what it was to train hard and run moderate (70 to 75) mileage for a long season with lots of races.
So when I graduated, I decided to become a decathlete. I'm pretty terrible at some of the events, but I've made lots of progressed and learned a ton about sprints and field events along the way, in a way I never would have understood if I had just gone to coaching clinics.
Compared to that first year, I've taken my 100m time down to 11.5, my lj to 21-4, shotput to 40 feet, pole vault to 14-5, etc. All not great marks, but I've put in full seasons of hard training now, done the lifting, worked on the techniques, and discovered that some of the events are just fun on their own, even if you aren't competing.
I do believe it makes me a better coach for any event to have background in others. This is especially true in the technical events if I'm working with an athlete who does more than one event, since I can tie what I'm working with them on to the other event they do and make comparisons of what is similar or different with the skill they're currently focusing on.
Anyway, 45 minutes between finals in the 100 and 200 would suck. Going from the 100m to lj with 30 minutes break in a Dec isn't mentally hard, but you can tell your legs have lost a tiny bit of explosiveness just from that one 100m race. I think for a more explosive sprinter, a good starter type, this would be even more true. The 45 minute break will slightly shift who can do the double towards favoring a more efficient and top end type of runner over a more explosive runner.