Deemphasizing Cross Country in HS

sisyphus wrote:

I love the 1200 threshold/ 300 hill hard. Very similar to some of my favorite workouts. I've tried so many different things and gotten good results from vastly different approaches. I must admit, while I don't think it's necessary, I've gotten to like drastic reduction in mileage the final week. I have also done really well with partial quality either every day or 4 of the last 5 days before the big one. I think it works best when - as we've been talking about - race pace and faster has been minimal until the last month. I'd say the best peak I've ever seen was off of, solely tempo and racing until 4 weeks to go. Then race pace and a little mile pace for three weeks but the workouts aren't killer. Then medium days for three days, a day off, and a very short race pace day before.

Doesn't that partial quality every day for a week before the peak have some name attached to it? I seem to recall someone actually did research on that, published the results in a journal, and the results were pretty positive.

Some Coach,

If you really dig into Lydiard you see a lot of schedules that are minor quality day after day. Snell's logs showed recovery days of like 3 miles at 5 minute pace. That was my original inspiration.... Well that and when I was young and foolish I would just keep doing different workouts day after day and it actually paid off at times. (16x400 the day before a PR in the 3200 summer before my senior year year - then ran near my 5k pr an hour later). I believe what you are referring to is Carolina Cruisers (or cruising)which was a study at East Carolina University. The critique of the study is that the runners did no speed until the peak week; all the same they took like 27 seconds off their 5k on average. The rumor is Griswold used them... another peaking machine. I don't like the same distance and pace every day aspect of them, personally. I vary it with tempo, 5k pace, mile pace, and even a few brisk 200s (only 4) with lots of rest. That's over the course of 4-5 days, not one workout.

So over that four day period you use decending pace ... interesting in that I immediately thought of Peter Coe and how he set up his 14 day microcycles in that fashion, with aerobic strength decending down into something more glycolytic/lactic based at the end. It would seem at the surface to have no correlation .... but maybe the body responds favorably to that type of set up rather than macro type blocks of the same stuff over and over. Food for thought.

What's the point of "developing athletes" most kids will never run in college. This is IT. If you can win w/o doing lung burning interval sessions, great, but to purposly use XC and just a season of conditioning isn't fair.

Why even enter the meet if you aren't trying?