Get the inside scoop on Drew Hunter's training - LetsRun's feature on Tom "Tinman" Schwartz

Brit Ekland wrote:

Jon Orange wrote:

I don't know why tinman has chosed 90% VO2max or named it critical value pace, I suspect that he is trying to get runners to train more carefully to avoid peaking too early?

But there will be some faster pace workouts before a mile race. I don't follow his website or Hunter's training, but I do think that a lot of young American runners don't get far beyond the collegiate system due to lack of support and good coaching. All that talent going to waste....

and how are the young Brits doing these days?

Not very well as a whole. I think all this drug talk puts them off. That's what happened to an immensely talented young runner I know.

One of my club mates from North Yorkshire is doing rather well in the US. I won't name him

Looking at Tinman's calculator on runningprs.com, the training zones are actually not static percentages of VO2max speed or race efforts. Rather like maximum average speeds that you can hold for a certain amount of time.

For most trained people, they are:

VO2max: 7 min

Aerobic Power: 15 min

CV: 33 min

Treshold: 1 hour

Tempo: 2 hours

tell the twooth! wrote:

Truth teller!! wrote:

Running repeats at or slightly slower that 10k pace with a shortish jog rest is nothing new. I have a running training book written by Anders Gärderud in the 1980s where he advocates just that, so "tinman" didn´t invent that - he just gave it a new name.

Except that nobody does it. High schools don't. Colleges don't. Your running group doesn't. I don't go to my running group's weekly track workouts because they are killing themselves with 5K pace mile repeats.

Wrong! When my club have Friday evening road repeats a standard session is 10x3 minutes with a minute jog. We are always told by our coach "not to tie up" and "this is not a race", so it´s most likely something like 10k pace.

The best way to avoid running too fast is to stay away from the f*ing track whenever you do longer repeats. We never do anything longer than 600m repeats on the track.

localboy wrote:

come on, trying to say there are a dozen+ boys out there as talented as Hunter is such a farce a screams of vanity.

Yeah I get soo tired of this trope. Look there is NOTHING WRONG WITH BEING TALENTED, that does not mean they do not work hard as well.

But you could take 100 kids put them on the same plan and you would NOT get these results.

Yes it does get tiresome... the typical "origin story" of national class/elite runners male or female usually goes something like this.

"I was on the soccer/fball/swim/bball team and wasn't doing that well. A friend of mine asked me to come out for xc/track. The first practices were hard but after a few weeks I was doing OK, later that year I won the regional meet and I decided I liked this sport. The next year I went to footlocker and finished in the top 10...."

THAT IS NOT NORMAL.

south dakota wrote:

I think Tinman is a very good coach. But the claim that Hunter is a normal/good/unexceptional talent, and the associated idea that all of his success is due to his great coach, and supportive family, and complete buy-in to the program... I don't buy it at all. Hunter is clearly very, very talented, more talented than almost any other US HS runner. And, yes, he is well-coached too, and everything else. But ff every FL finalist was somehow hypothetically world-class coached too, then (I think) Drew still wins the race, maybe not by twelve seconds, but don't pretend he would be fifteenth. If they all really believe that, fine, maybe it's good psychological ammunition, but certainly not right. So, certainly a great coach, but don't pretend that stumbling upon a sub4 HS miler was inevitable.

You are right. Hunter ran 8:16.31 at the Penn Relays as a sophomore. That is about the same a 8:56.0y and 8:52.9 for 3200m. So he has Rudy Chapa and Bill McChesney type talent. Looking into it a little closer I see that he ran 8:53.81 for 2nd at NBN outdoor as a soph.

I don't know if that is a 10th-grade record or an age-16 record, but I do know that very few people in the last 60 years have broken 9:00 for 2M as a soph. Relatively few people in any grade have run 8:53y.

So what we have here is a guy that ran 8:53y as a soph and 8:43y as a junior, and looks well on his way to the 8:30s as a senior. It looks like he will also run sub-4 indoors and out.

There has never been someone with this collection of times in each grade. Jim Ryun had a better collection of times from each grade for the mile (4:07, 3:59.0, 3:55.3) and was a better miler, but did not have the 2M ability that Hunter has. Not to mention the XC ability.

I am not even sure Lindgren could have run 8:53 as a soph. Considering he ran 8:06i and 8:40.0i as a senior I doubt he could have.

Nobody else has run sub-8 indoors, or as fast for the indoor mile, or 8:43 as a junior. Based on all of this (and he hasn't even completed indoors yet) he is that greatest talent the US has ever seen.

Jon Orange wrote:

Brit Ekland wrote:

and how are the young Brits doing these days?

Not very well as a whole. I think all this drug talk puts them off. That's what happened to an immensely talented young runner I know.

Smart kid for realizing that even with talent you can't compete against the doped up.

Regardless of whether he is the "greatest" talent yet... he has a long career ahead of him.

Let's hope he can remain injury free.

ok so I'm going to do 6-8 x 1000 at 10k pace today as an experiment.

it seems too easy - the challenge will be holding back. I'd usually do that at closer to 5k-8k pace.

Maybe I'll do it in some hills just to get some extra work.

tasker wrote:

ok so I'm going to do 6-8 x 1000 at 10k pace today as an experiment.

it seems too easy - the challenge will be holding back. I'd usually do that at closer to 5k-8k pace.

Maybe I'll do it in some hills just to get some extra work.

You're completely missing the point.

So, he was showing signs of great talent before Tinman started coaching him?

Then Tinman was lucky that Drew's mom latched onto him, and world class? talent fell in his lap.

So his training theories will get a lot of play, based on this bit of luck.

Just Some Real Thoughts wrote:

tasker wrote:

ok so I'm going to do 6-8 x 1000 at 10k pace today as an experiment.

it seems too easy - the challenge will be holding back. I'd usually do that at closer to 5k-8k pace.

Maybe I'll do it in some hills just to get some extra work.

You're completely missing the point.

yeah I know

ok no hills. 10k pace. I'll try not to be bored

You are allowed a few quick 200s after.

His mom used Tinman's training theories the whole time. Look at Hunter freshman year before Tinman style coaching: 4:40 and 9:40. Now I know he wasn't as invested, but clearly Tinman's style of training works. The rest of Loudoun Valley made quite a renaissance once Hunter's mom started coaching. That's Tinman style training, and it's not quite a good team.

The fight wrote:

fred wrote:

So, he was showing signs of great talent before Tinman started coaching him?

Then Tinman was lucky that Drew's mom latched onto him, and world class? talent fell in his lap.

So his training theories will get a lot of play, based on this bit of luck.

His mom used Tinman's training theories the whole time. Look at Hunter freshman year before Tinman style coaching: 4:40 and 9:40. Now I know he wasn't as invested, but clearly Tinman's style of training works. The rest of Loudoun Valley made quite a renaissance once Hunter's mom started coaching. That's Tinman style training, and it's not quite a good team.

Nope.

"His parents were surprised, then, when Drew told them he was going out for cross country. This news broke about a month before the start of cross country season, after which “I trained like three days a week, running 30 minutes just like every other day, jogging,” Drew said."

Nope, he ran the 4:40 off of jogging 3 days times 30 minutes. The talent was there and it was expressed through just running more. It didn't have anything to do with CV.

See, people want to believe that there's a magical training system, and magical workouts. But what they can't accept is their own lack of talent. If only I do workout Z ( critical velocity ), I too can be a sub 4 miler.

tasker wrote:

Just Some Real Thoughts wrote:

You're completely missing the point.

yeah I know

ok no hills. 10k pace. I'll try not to be bored

When it was said earlier that 1km reps at 10k effort were nothing revolutionary and written into every runners schedule - then someone else said, "yea, but nobody ACTUALLY does it" - remember that? Here's your proof! There are so many people out there who are given the concept with no excuses to mess it up, but they still can't apply it correctly.

Read what you just quoted. Hunter's training the summer before freshman year was relatively pitiful, and that took him to an 18:57 debut 5k. That's still pretty good for a first race, but no, he didn't run anywhere near 4:40 jogging three times a week. After a full season of training, he ran 16:43. In track that year, after 9 months of training, if I recall correctly, 30 miles a week with plenty of interval workouts, he ran the 4:40 and 9:40. Once the Hunters took over coaching and applied more mileage, more tempos, and fewer intervals, Hunter got a lot faster, and his team got a hell of a lot better. Look up the season results for Loudon Valley this year, last year, the year before, and the year before that. It's astounding. Yes, there's a new surfeit of talent in part due to Drew's success, but very clearly, the team applied one method of training for a while that led to mediocre results, and then switched to another method of training that high school kids could stomach and thrive on, which led to startlingly good results.

I fully admit that Hunter is insanely talented. If he were running for American Fork, he probably would be almost as fast, or maybe even faster, albeit at altitude. If he were running for Joe Schmo school with a decent coach, he might still be a sub-4 miler. But it's not luck that Tinman coached him. He had a good training philosophy, which worked for the Hunters, and they applied it to their son and their team.

Not everyone can be a sub-4 miler. If everyone at Loudon Valley did Hunter's training, they wouldn't all be sub-4. But they are all doing a variant of Hunter's training, and they're all way faster now.

Fred is just jelly. He's probably an old school running coach and can't admit Tinman's training is working.

Runner's World:

"The summer before his freshman year, Hunter decided to go out for cross country. He guesses he ran three times a week that summer, probably 20 minutes at eight-minute pace each time. But that family talent showed: He ran 16:43 for 5K and 9:40 for the two-mile, playing basketball between seasons."

So he ran 3 @ 5:23 off of weeks that were

3 training days of 2.5 miles ( 7.5 miles jogging )

Then he played basketball and off that base ran 2 @ 4:50.

This is before any Tinman training.