What was Deena 800/1600/3200/5000m high school PRs.
Answered my own question with my google magic as she’s one if my favorite all time runners… about a 4:55 / 10:30 athlete, excellent in Cross Country, didn’t fulfill her potential at Arkansas. Great piece here-
Do you want to succéed or just whine you were not good enough ? I ran a marathon in HS at that pace for 18 miles … did double workout on the weekends - if the training plan is solid go for it !
It depends on the pace. 5miles tempo at anaerobic threshold is very hard and too much for most. 5miles at aerobic threshold is quite easy.
Tempo for decades has been synonymous with anaerobic threshold.
So you agree with the OP
I agree with you, but it's definitely branched off (or the term has at least been muddied) in the past 5-10 years, thanks to fitness apps and platforms that label zone 3 HR training (an intensity closer to aerobic threshold) as "tempo".
the Run CCG kids don't do well in college, the same way Fayettville Manlius from NY kids from their dominant years didn't old up.
Bill Aris crushed them with a college/pro style training program for 4+ years, and by the time they hit college, they fizzled out. Props to them for winning Natties though.
But look at the names that were heavyweights in NYS and the national stage, went to college, and just disappeared.
Off the top of my head- Bryce Millar, Andrew Berge, Kyle Barber, literally the entire Ryan family, Annika Avery, Sam Levy, Claire Walters....All ran super fast times in HS, but had iffy college careers.
Maybe over training high school athletes doesn't work.
high school athletes are not binary. some should be doing 5 mile tempo runs and some shouldn't be doing 5 mile tempo runs. i have no idea about the purpose of this post.
Run CCG is pretty obnoxious. They’re seeking something but some of the time they brag about are meh. I have never liked private coaches sniffing around teams, making money off of families, exploiting the insatiable desire to sign for a college. Hucksters.
Our coach had varsity guys running 6 mile tempos when I was in HS (early 2010’s) his memo was that if you could run 6 mile tempo @ 6 min pace controlled then you could run 16:30 for 5K. Usually us top guys were running them @ 5:20-5:30 per mile. We had multiple guys running 15:30 & sub 16 every year & were state contenders every year. First year of college you will be racing an extra 2 miles in 8K so what’s wrong with preparing your top guys for the long tempo runs they will be doing in doing college? We would also do some pretty insane 15-16 mile long runs.
This is where the difference in intensity matters. 6 miles at ~40s off 5k pace is pretty doable. 6 miles at more like 25s gets really hard. It is really about that control level. It is somewhat easy for a 17:30 runner to run 6:00 pace for 6 miles. But it ends up being the difference between a workout and a race. For HS kids it can be hard not to keep ups with friends (and some of them are on the rapid improvement curve were they go from 17:30 to 16:30 in a month).
In the end a lot of people credit distance as making something hard. It rarely is. Speed is the killer. 6 miles 40s off your 5k pace is a heck of a lot easier than 3*1 mile at 5k pace....
Our coach had varsity guys running 6 mile tempos when I was in HS (early 2010’s) his memo was that if you could run 6 mile tempo @ 6 min pace controlled then you could run 16:30 for 5K. Usually us top guys were running them @ 5:20-5:30 per mile. We had multiple guys running 15:30 & sub 16 every year & were state contenders every year. First year of college you will be racing an extra 2 miles in 8K so what’s wrong with preparing your top guys for the long tempo runs they will be doing in doing college? We would also do some pretty insane 15-16 mile long runs.
This is where the difference in intensity matters. 6 miles at ~40s off 5k pace is pretty doable. 6 miles at more like 25s gets really hard. It is really about that control level. It is somewhat easy for a 17:30 runner to run 6:00 pace for 6 miles. But it ends up being the difference between a workout and a race. For HS kids it can be hard not to keep ups with friends (and some of them are on the rapid improvement curve were they go from 17:30 to 16:30 in a month).
In the end a lot of people credit distance as making something hard. It rarely is. Speed is the killer. 6 miles 40s off your 5k pace is a heck of a lot easier than 3*1 mile at 5k pace....
I would say that’s where the coach comes in. Ours would send us home if we were running too fast in workouts.
Imagine telling a soccer player or basketball player not to play too much of their sport.
If you're going to be a competitive distance runner you're going to have to run an incredible amount of miles in training and at times you're going to have to run incredibly fast.
And you're also going to have to lift weights, cross train with biking and/or swimming, run strides, do drills, stretching, proper nutrition, get enough sleep, etc.
This is what it takes to actually get good at this running thing. There is no short cut to high level, long term success.
There's litteraly no 10th grader in the world who ran under 14 and 30, and double thresholds will get me there like they got jakob ingebrigtsen to 3:27 and the olympic title but I guess he's not good enough because he didn't broke 14 or 30 in 10th grade
The bigger issue is most athletes and coaches do not know what a tempo effort is. A 5:30 tempo would mean the athlete is racing sub 15.
Your average high school male athlete that runs at around 18 for a 5k has a tempo in the high 6:30's. So, a lot of those guys are running tempo pace on regular training runs for several miles on any given day without even knowing it. Then they might come on here and say they never go longer than 20 minutes at tempo effort.
There's litteraly no 10th grader in the world who ran under 14 and 30, and double thresholds will get me there like they got jakob ingebrigtsen to 3:27 and the olympic title but I guess he's not good enough because he didn't broke 14 or 30 in 10th grade
Uh, about a dozen Japanese sophomores in high school ran under 30:00 in the last couple of years.
the Run CCG kids don't do well in college, the same way Fayettville Manlius from NY kids from their dominant years didn't old up.
Bill Aris crushed them with a college/pro style training program for 4+ years, and by the time they hit college, they fizzled out. Props to them for winning Natties though.
But look at the names that were heavyweights in NYS and the national stage, went to college, and just disappeared.
Off the top of my head- Bryce Millar, Andrew Berge, Kyle Barber, literally the entire Ryan family, Annika Avery, Sam Levy, Claire Walters....All ran super fast times in HS, but had iffy college careers.
Maybe over training high school athletes doesn't work.
Is this a bad thing? The money in running is almost entirely limited to college support for all but 10 athletes or so. Why delay their lives when they can enjoy their teen years and maximally profit from the sport at the same time?
Not sure about it but even if it's true it still doesn't have anything to do with the topic and the fact that double thresholds are effective for high schoolers and I wouldn't be surprised to find out that those Japanese kids (if there are any) used double thersholds in their training for that sub 30
I guess I didn't exist, too bad all those high school and college runners weren't running on me.
OK, so I come back a while later and find a poster who wasn't buying my story. Then, another poster backs me up....using the exact same trail as an example! For what it's worth, the tempo in question was from about the current 20 mile mark to the 15. This was that exact run on the particular day that sticks in my mind - not my only run on that trail.
Now, for those of you who know the area, you may know it wasn't always a 31-mile-plus trail. It was 2 different trails prior to the bridge connecting Goethe Park (called something else now - maybe River Bend Park) with William Pond Park. Basically connecting Rancho Cordova and Carmichael. If I am remembering accurately, the bridge was built in '79 or '80.
So, Discovery Park to the site of the current bridge was and is 13-1/2 miles. Then on the other side, you could only go as far as Hazel Ave. for a while. So that was a 9 mile stretch. This is where most of my teenage running took place. So, that's why I said the 'current' 15-20 mile markers since the Rancho section of trail at the time had it's own markers that predated the unification of the trails. Eventually, trails went along both sides of Lake Natomas, but it would be sometime in the '80s before that existed. Not sure when it made it to Granite Bay for it's current length.
At any rate, the trail existed in the early '70s that I'm aware of. Not sure how much earlier than that. Great route and very popular more than 40 years ago (when somebody claimed it didn't exist) and now.
Yeah, I hate to break it to these younger people, but we weren't living in the stone ages. I am 65, and we had bike paths on Long Island in my pre-teens in the 1960s that I roade my (one-speed!) bike on. And I remember very clearly doing a ten-mile run on the bike path to Jones Beach the week before the NY State XC meet in early November 1974. The faster guys on my team did it in about 56 minutes; I was 58:30 or so. I had a recent on-line exchange with a coupe of them in which they vividly remembered the same run, so I'm clearly not making it up.
Imagine telling a soccer player or basketball player not to play too much of their sport.
If you're going to be a competitive distance runner you're going to have to run an incredible amount of miles in training and at times you're going to have to run incredibly fast.
And you're also going to have to lift weights, cross train with biking and/or swimming, run strides, do drills, stretching, proper nutrition, get enough sleep, etc.
This is what it takes to actually get good at this running thing. There is no short cut to high level, long term success.
A more accurate comparison is a high school basketball player spending hours at practice shooting 3s from halfcourt instead of working on the fundamentals like dribbling, passing, screen and roll, and defense. if you put the cart before the course, you are going to have a VERY SHORT career.
Not sure about it but even if it's true it still doesn't have anything to do with the topic and the fact that double thresholds are effective for high schoolers and I wouldn't be surprised to find out that those Japanese kids (if there are any) used double thersholds in their training for that sub 30
Japanese high school and college athletes produce insane results at young ages BUT THEY DO NOTHING ON THE WORLD STAGE. Their intense training at young ages ruins their long term development.
Not sure about it but even if it's true it still doesn't have anything to do with the topic and the fact that double thresholds are effective for high schoolers and I wouldn't be surprised to find out that those Japanese kids (if there are any) used double thersholds in their training for that sub 30
Japanese high school and college athletes produce insane results at young ages BUT THEY DO NOTHING ON THE WORLD STAGE. Their intense training at young ages ruins their long term development.
I don’t know that that’s accurate or fair. Japan currently has 10 women and four men ranked in the top 100 for the marathon, while the US has six women and zero men.
This is where the difference in intensity matters. 6 miles at ~40s off 5k pace is pretty doable. 6 miles at more like 25s gets really hard. It is really about that control level. It is somewhat easy for a 17:30 runner to run 6:00 pace for 6 miles. But it ends up being the difference between a workout and a race. For HS kids it can be hard not to keep ups with friends (and some of them are on the rapid improvement curve were they go from 17:30 to 16:30 in a month).
In the end a lot of people credit distance as making something hard. It rarely is. Speed is the killer. 6 miles 40s off your 5k pace is a heck of a lot easier than 3*1 mile at 5k pace....
I would say that’s where the coach comes in. Ours would send us home if we were running too fast in workouts.
Send you home for running too fast? If they pick that rather than just telling you to slow down then they are a bad coach.