Weirdest workout you've run or seen run

My college coach was a great guy but a little crazy. He was in The Guiness Book of World Records for the most jumping jacks, 20,088. Anyway he decided to try to break the stretcher carrying record with a bunch of distance runners and sprinters form the track team. The record was 96 miles. We made it about 46 miles in 12 hours

Some of you may remember me telling you about this before.

In Kunming at the Provincial sports school, I watched the race walkers get chewed out for about 45 minutes while they were standing at attention, military style. Then the coach orders one guy to start doing somersaults until he litterally PUKED.

Jason

Victrack - Where did you do your sand hills? We did them too, at a place called Sand Dune Park (at least that's what we called it) in Manhattan Beach, CA. "Coach Bob" didn't have to push sand down at us because that sucker was big. Really fun to go flying down, but a real MF going back up.

CO-Runner .. I/we did many very hard workouts yep very many and yep very hard (not unusual to be on track for 3 or so hrs doing maniacal intervals - yep, we were dumb) ... but this was one of the most demanding 'workouts' i did, and one of the most memorable. and I was in very good shape. I think i ave hi 4:30s for the first ~ 20+.

our 10k/marathon type guys ave lo-mid 4:40s for 30 miles - i've got the results somewhere. As I recall, it 'hit' many of us at ~23-24-25 mi - I know it hit me about then - big time. I am not sure I would recommend it, unless I didn't like you. You better check how you stand with your coach! Nice to look back on tho.

The 24 hr relay was a novel idea when we did it. The USA OLY training camp guys ('69 or '70 - I think) ran it at their camp in Montana - I think.

Interesting, our coach was into "character building" workouts such as the 24 hour relay. Now that I'm an old guy ;-) I am disappointed that we didn't do the relay. I'm wondering where my coach got this notion ... he was a sub 2:15 / sub 29:00 guy for the marathon / 10K guy back in the early 80's.

1) my old highschool coach used to coach a university team back in the day. He once made his team of x-runners do a 2x 60min tempo, follow by 4x800s. The runners made certificates, signed and framed them, for completing the workout. It was dubbed: "Black Tuesday"

2) When i was in grade nine, my coach once picked me up for practice in the morning. We were supposed to drive down to the track, but he just kept on driving. i Asked him what the workout was, and why we passed the track. A while longer, he stopped the car looked at me and said: "get out, your running home"

TRaining for triathlons is bitch work. Our coach once made us do a 6km swim workout at 6:30am, then get out of the pool, and drive down to a local 5km road race, then after the race do a 3hour long cycle ride.

Thats some severe mileage. and we only train for olympic distance triathlons. Those ironman guys do over 80miles a week on the run, 500 to 800miles on the bike and over 50km of swimming.

The 24-hour relay was the most brutal thing I've ever done- it ruined my entire Jr year of HS cross, but the memory is burned in, so maybe it was worth it in weird way.

A few years ago I spent six days rock climbing on a 3000-foot vertical rock face in the North Cascades of WA. on two of the days I put on the headphones and ran in place (tied into the rope and anchor) for 45 minutes on a 3-foot wide ledge, which was our bivouac and only flat spot on the entire wall. My partner was convinced I was insane for needing to do this, but three days after my return I ran a PR for 3000.

I'm about 10 yrs older than your coach ... we hit that 24 hr thing at its inception we did in 1/72 I think and we had guys in his range or a bit faster. The running 'boom' was well under way by early 80s - soo . 'Character building' I doubt. I was thinking if we kept it at 20m rather than 24hr - we may have peeked at character stuff. Knowing our guys tho we would have picked the pace up, perhaps ending up where we did w/ 24hr. Hindsight ...

We had wanted to 'break' the WR set by some guys in England I think. We ended up 3rd on 'all-time' world list - just behind the USA Oly guys.

I'm betting the 24hr relay was more 'visible' in the running groupee types when your coach ran. It did get get some exposure in RW - and that tended to fuel all kinds of crazy stuff. RW, at the time, was a well respected (and relatively new) mag. A nice complement to t&fn. Ideas tended to move about through word of mouth and those two mags then.

The European(Igloi-Tabori)/Lydiard-Cerutty/Australia (Clarke)/Britain and even US (Lindgren-an emerging Bowerman) elements were being test-driven by many. If memory serves there was a bit of 'not so friendly' competition for disciples. And there were 'anti-training' camps too. Pretty strong personalities and opinions. I'm not sure however if any of those mentioned would do the 24 hr thing - they did, however have their own brand of 'character building' workouts.

I worked out with Tabori for a ~summer. His workouts were legendary, and for a reason. He used to determine a 'character building ' workout by the following 'data'. After a workout, during our visible death looks, he would ask "You peece blood? Not a hard workout unless you "peece blood." I never had a hard workout with him, but I did have the death look.

And one thing he did develop - you learned you almost always had more in you than you thought. I had a teammate who trained with him for a number of years - his stories about Tabori were something to listen to. Maybe he would have liked that 24 hr - but it would have had to pass the 'peece' test.

Well that's my 24hr ... response

Zapotek,

Who was your coach? My parents might have had the same coach as you. I think his name was Joe something at University of Puget Sound.

my HS track coach was an idiot, one day she told us to do 8 x 200m in 25s each, jogging the other 200m back around to the starting line in 35s and running them continuously. I geuss she didn't know that she was asking us to run 2 miles, at altitude, at 4 min pace on a square, sandy, dirt track.

Ya sandhills are a great workout, but definetly hurt like a MF'er. The sandhill that i ran on is Victoria B.C., Canada at Mt Doug Park. It's about 50m high. There's also a gravel pit that has the biggest sandhills that i've ever seen except they don't really like people running up them.

A workout called the Debt Charge, as in Oxygen Debt. There are 2 versions depending upon the race you're training for.

For 5k/10k people it goes: 1000m, 900m, 800m, 700m, 600m, 500m, 400m, 300m, 200m, 100m all at 10k pace and with distance pace 100m rest between intervals. 5500m of intervals + 900m of "rest".

For 20k & up people: 2000m, 1800m, ... 200m w/ 200m rest same as above. 11000m of intervals + 1800m of "rest"

Make sure you have huge water bottles on both sides of the track, cause stopping is for wimps.

Don't do the 20k one more than 2x a season and not closer than 3 weeks before a big event or you're screwed.

csrunner wrote:

my HS track coach was an idiot, one day she told us to do 8 x 200m in 25s each, jogging the other 200m back around to the starting line in 35s and running them continuously. I geuss she didn't know that she was asking us to run 2 miles, at altitude, at 4 min pace on a square, sandy, dirt track.

That's actually a good early season workout for an 800/Mile person!!

mjr wrote:

That's actually a good early season workout for an 800/Mile person!!

That's actually almost a world record!!

Victrack or MN Chris:

I cannot figure out which one of you referred first to "Coach Bob," but isn't that Bob Hotel you're citing?

Hmm. Bob Holtel was my first coach in high school, but he 'retired' after my freshman year. How did/do you know him?

(The 'Coach Bob' to whom I referred in that message was Bob Wilson of Grossmont JC, Long Beach State, and the Jamul Toads, who was my senior year coach and a great guy. I wonder whatever happened to him.)

When I went on vacation to Jamaica last summer, the streets were completely over-run by vicious dogs. A couple of times these dogs chased me on my runs, trying to eat my flesh, as they were very hungry and were not fed by any owner. After day 2 I was forced to do my runs (between 6 and 8 miles per day) up and down a dog-less 50 meter straight away in front of the house. Horrible!

partying on bourbon st. after ncaas a friend of mine got arrested at about 3 a.m. i sprinted back to the hotel, woke up my 2 passed out friends and told them the situation. we ran 2.5 miles to jail as fast as we could. when we found out we couldn't bail my friend out we decided to leave him to make our 6 a.m. flight. one of my friends was injured and said he couldn't run, so me and another guy ran another 2.5 back to the hotel. we grabbed our luggage (four people's worth) and hauled it the 2.5 miles back to the hotel as fast we could. 7.5 miles, 2.5 with lots of luggage, all while totally hammered. we had just enough $ between the 3 of us to take a cab to the airport just in time for our flight.