Full recovery needed for distance runners doing max speed?

CoachB wrote:

To make the math simple, let’s say you had a kid who could run 12.5 in the 100. Why not have him slow down to 90%? That would still be a 13.7, which is far faster than almost any high school race ever finishes. Do 3-4 of those 3 times a week during base after an aerobic session. That seems like it would accomplish the goal of developing the type of speed needed on a race without taking away from your athletes ability to do other training on that day.

are you talking about strides?

You’re over analyzing this. You are not trying to develop sub-1:50 800m guys or trying to eek out an extra 0.5 seconds out of them. That’s what sprint training can do. You’re better off focusing on their aerobic strength and including strides throughout the week to maintain basic turnover. It’s not their speed that’s holding them back. It’s how they feel at the 600m mark.

cvhnnvnnjjb wrote:

You’re over analyzing this. You are not trying to develop sub-1:50 800m guys or trying to eek out an extra 0.5 seconds out of them. That’s what sprint training can do. You’re better off focusing on their aerobic strength and including strides throughout the week to maintain basic turnover. It’s not their speed that’s holding them back. It’s how they feel at the 600m mark.

Sprinting all year long is as mandatory as aerobic strengh for 800m runner.

It not about last kick in the end but a bout start and margin for running the first 400 fast.

Speed work also developp fastwich fibers and running form which are very important for 800m runner.

By the way, 90% max speed is like 400speed. So you should work on both 400speed and max speed. (max speed with shorter distances than 400 speed)

Also the work should be done in different ways : mostly hills and strides in fall and winter and mostly on track with spikes in spring and during competition phase with increasing the lengh of the reps.

I`m with you here in this matter of developing max individual sprint speed . It`s very important when coaching 400- 800 runners, and even 1500/mile. What happens when they reach relaxed top sprint speed is that every other speed required for the development will feel much easier than without this all out sprint training. But I let these all out 10-30 m sprints stay at all out pace and sometimes alternate or complement with another kind of sprint repetition workout e.g

2 x ( 300,200,100) or 2 x ( 400, 300, 200) .So if I make a summary of this I advocate the all out short sprints for the purpose to help all the other speeds needed for best individual result.

I agree that the OP is overthinking things. Instead of worrying about data and all of these percentage points, you could have just “strides.” Keeping it simple is a good solution for most problems in life.

And why can’t you do Canova style hill sprints or some flying 40s? You can do that year round without an issue.

If you slow down your not training the same system. Once a week is better and if done correctly.

Year round short sprinting (max speed) was the thing that took my 4x8 squads from being pretty good - 8:00-8:10 - to great - Sub 7:50. And it also showed in their 4x4 splits. During the early years, I'd be happy if they could split 53-54. Later on, I would say our slowest (and these are all cross country guys) could split 50-52 consistently.

We would always run an indoor race around 8:20-8:30, then middle of outdoor, 8:15 or so, then finish up the year at 8:05 on average let's say. Good, but nothing amazing. We still did sprinting, but not as a core part of the training all year. Then we started (slowly) in december with it and did it every week, building it up and carrying it through May and we started running 7:50s and under. Different guys over the course of a decade, of course, but I think it was definitely a turning point.

We live in the midwest, so in the winter, it was mostly hill sprints due to the weather, but we sometimes got the opportunity after a bit to run on the track doing some flat things. Outdoors, we leaned more into flat sprints extending the length.

In terms of rest - this is a big deal. When I initially told them they needed to rest 2-3 minutes between something that only takes 6-8 seconds, they didn't understand. But at the same time, some people just don't know how to sprint, so they only go, say, 90% of max speed and if they take 1 minute of rest, they're good to go.

So we spent time working with our sprint coach to teach mechanics, did a lot of drills, worked on flexibility, and exercises for power to help enable them to be able to sprint. Just like anything, its a skill that can be improved.

Coach B and Good HS coach,

How do you guys fit the sprints into your program? I’ve seen them done on their own with no other running other than a warmup for a kind of easy day or adjacent to a workout. Either right before the workout, the morning of an afternoon workout, or the day before. What have you guys tried, and what seems to work the best for your athletes?

I think I've been one of the bigger advocates of speed development, at least with being vocal about it.

What you're coming across is where the real world starts meeting theory. As many times as myself or someone else might expound the benefits of pure speed development, the reality is we don't live in a vacuum. We have a lot of things to develop and while I firmly believe speed reserve is one of the best pieces of "endurance" out there, there's a diminishing return somewhere.

You won't "ruin" a speed session by having a high level HS male run a very easy 7 miles then take a 5-10 minute break before hitting 4x80m with a full recovery. Is it perfect? No. does it do the job good enough? For that situation, probably. I'd never expect a HS athlete mid-season to be doing doubles so it's hard to say, get in 4 miles before school, then we'll have all the time we need for speed development during practice. The reality is 4x80m all-out with a full recovery is more than most programs do.

Ideally, you'll have opportunities to address speed on its own. It's much easier to add on a recovery day than people realize, but some sufficiently high level athletes still have a high workload on an easier day.

Here's a few things that can help to get in speed development that are (usually) "good enough" to still be worth it.

- incorporate speed development into the end of your warm-up. You're still fresh and while there might be some training interference from the subsequent session, you're still expressing speed at a high level. This same idea can be used to start off a workout with a few fast sprints.

- incorporate speed development into the end of your cool-down. I've never used this, but I knew the coach of a National champion 4x800m team that has been using this for a while and has been a pretty successful program for the better part of a decade

- Add speed development after a run. Again, not perfect, but how tired is a 7 mile run for a guy running 50 miles a week? usually it's not so bad that they can't still express speed meaningfully. Pre-workout days are totally fine to have a few high quality alactic sprints done without interfering with tomorrow's session.

There's a lot I'd love to add to a typical training cycle. The reality is we can't fit in everything all the time. Coaching is all about deciding what is necessary, what is unnecessary, and what is good enough. A 5 mile day with ton's of speed development will probably never fit in a Wetmore training plan that has 90 miles a week. That doesn't mean that 2x80m all-out after your warm-up and strides couldn't add something. Is it as potent as what you might expect a Donovan Brazier to be doing? I doubt it, but it doesn't need to be. Wetmore is a lot more successful than I am and he's found that this kind of work isn't as necessary as the rest of their training. For me, I can say I'd rather miss a double than take out high level sprinting, that's a trade I'm willing to make.

V

As always, your posts are well thought out and full of practical info. Much of what you said is what we already do. Specifically 1-2 all our efforts as part of the warm up and or tacking on hill sprints at the end of an easy to moderate session.

I feel like during the off season, we are in a good time to do pure speed development workouts. That is what we did leading into the track season. But like I said in the original post, I don’t know if those results were really any better

Right now, we are meeting 3 times per week, M,W,Th. Monday is a fartlek or tempo, Wednesday speed, Thursday long. At least for the next 4-6 weeks, I plan on keeping this pattern. I feel like we could safely tack on hill sprints after the Monday workout as well. A bunch of my kids just did them yesterday without being instructed to do so.

For you guys that said I overthink things, I know you recognize me from other threads, but this one I really don’t consider to be overthinking. I gave the example of a kid who could run 12.5 in the 100 running 13.7. Those were just meant to be examples of something that I would consider to be faster than what we normally consider strides, but slower than a max sprint.

McFly wrote:

Coach B and Good HS coach,

How do you guys fit the sprints into your program? I’ve seen them done on their own with no other running other than a warmup for a kind of easy day or adjacent to a workout. Either right before the workout, the morning of an afternoon workout, or the day before. What have you guys tried, and what seems to work the best for your athletes?

During the track pre-season, wed run 1-3 miles wu, depending on the kid, do an extensive set of drills of increasing intensity, run 3x50 first at 70% effort, then 80, then 90. Then we’d do the actual sprint workout. Of 4-5 x 50-80m with 5 min recovery. Then we’d do 2-4 laps cool down, then hit the weights, high load, low reps, multi joint lifts (dead lift, squat, clean, front squat, etc) with some supplementary upper body lifts and core work.

My kids were definitely faster for 800 and below during the early part of the season. But as I said. The kids that came from soccer weren’t running well also. One of the soccer guys dropped an 39 then a 38 for 300 in practice with 8 minutes rest right before shut down.