HRE wrote:
Rabbanah wrote:
I am not seeing how this is a bad week. He has one "hard" workout and one race.
Just because someone calls it intervals or fartlek does not mean it is hard. Context matters here. This guy "thinks" he is doing hard efforts. Maybe he is just doing it wrong.
Something that I think coaches need to think about when they give interval sessions is what each runner is going to do with the session. There is a real tendency for runners doing interval sessions to want to keep up with everyone else or at least not finish last and that can result in some runners, especially slower ones, absolutely killing themselves in their early reps and having a much harder workout than is good for them. Giving a sessions of 200s at mile pace may have your 4:40 type guys running 35s but it will not follow that the 5:20 guys will not also start off at 35-36 because they don't want to look slow. And you cannot rule out your 4:40 guys wanting to run faster because it's impressive, because they don't want the 4:44 guy "beating" them in that session, etc.
A good and experienced coach will be aware of this happening and will try to control it. But from my experience and observation there are not tons of such coaches. It's more likely that a coach will react to a 5:20 guy running 35 for 10 of the reps and then dying by yelling at the kid to push harder in those later or some such thing. This is, of course, a massive over simplification, but I really believe that there is a lot of potential for interval training to be misused by coaches who do not understand it fully and in such cases it can do more harm than good.
I agree with this. I was putting it on the OP and you were suggesting the coach could still be the issue. That is all possible, but if done correctly the structure of the week that the OP suggested is not necessarily bad. I also agree that the coach should be able to explain to the athlete what the intent of each session is.