Team Boss broken?

McDonald slipped on some snow and sprained his ankle. The rest I’m not sure about.

pehis wrote:

McDonald slipped on some snow and sprained his ankle. The rest I’m not sure about.

See, Boss can't even prepare his athletes to not slip on ice, what kind of coach is he???

With the exception of Coburn, no one has progressed in that group. They just copied Wetmore training and would have progressed more under his coaching. From McGee to Scott, no progression or race savviness. Everyone gives Tinman posts, time to think about Insta-Boss. Meanwhile Coogs tearing it up.

while boss has elements of wetmore’s formula, its quite different. much more variety, and modern concepts

like an employee wrote:

With the exception of Coburn, no one has progressed in that group. They just copied Wetmore training and would have progressed more under his coaching. From McGee to Scott, no progression or race savviness. Everyone gives Tinman posts, time to think about Insta-Boss. Meanwhile Coogs tearing it up.

Cory McGee just ran within 1 second of her PB at the NBIGP 1500 and beat Nikki Hiltz, finishing 2nd. I think she's doing fine. Morgan McDonald's form looks fine other than his sprained ankle. Dani Jones just ran a 15:17 5000 indoors, which is much faster than her NCAA championship 15:50 from 2019. I think the training group is doing fine.

JBaller33 wrote:

like an employee wrote:

With the exception of Coburn, no one has progressed in that group. They just copied Wetmore training and would have progressed more under his coaching. From McGee to Scott, no progression or race savviness. Everyone gives Tinman posts, time to think about Insta-Boss. Meanwhile Coogs tearing it up.

Cory McGee just ran within 1 second of her PB at the NBIGP 1500 and beat Nikki Hiltz, finishing 2nd. I think she's doing fine. Morgan McDonald's form looks fine other than his sprained ankle. Dani Jones just ran a 15:17 5000 indoors, which is much faster than her NCAA championship 15:50 from 2019. I think the training group is doing fine.

Hahah dude that Jones 5k result is from over a year ago. Good work. McDonald is consistently losing to guys he beat in college with Klecker and Fisher. Cory looks like she’s regressing. Getting well out kicked by Osika and Sinclaire as well as by McClane (sp) who runs 800. She only beat Nikki because she is being coached by Mac Fleet and also clearly regressing. Tripp Hurt DNF in the 5k. Then Aisha Dom and Dani all injured and not even training. Yikes. Oh don’t forget Emma running a college 15:25 5k, about 40 seconds slower than Freirichs...

You might be right. A bigger question though is why are high mileage/high end aerobic based training groups like Team Boss and Tinman Elite struggling when BTC has a similar philosophy? A little more speedwork? Better facilities, strength training, and sports science for BTC to handle the high volume?

Also noticed Hoare has been training with Dathan Ritzenheim, and he looks like a serious threat. Who else is training with him?

Hoare is running with Klecker and Villarreal with Team On.

First of all, Tinman isn’t a high mileage team. Team Boss seems to be higher but they’re barely scraping 100 mpw at their peak for 5k guys like McDonald. Ritz’s group (OAC) is at 110 mpw (for Klecker at least) and BTC is at that level or maybe a little higher. I don’t think Team Boss has that much access to high quality facilities, but Tinman does and they’re not doing great either.

JBaller33 wrote:

You might be right. A bigger question though is why are high mileage/high end aerobic based training groups like Team Boss and Tinman Elite struggling when BTC has a similar philosophy? A little more speedwork? Better facilities, strength training, and sports science for BTC to handle the high volume?

Also noticed Hoare has been training with Dathan Ritzenheim, and he looks like a serious threat. Who else is training with him?

1) Tinman Elite is not high mileage.

2) One difference could well be doping/grey area drugs and medication. People still think that Salazar and his few runners were completely separated from anything else at Nike, when they actually trained together and Salazar and Schumacher often consulted with each other. Even if there is no "hard doping" involved, all the things like optimizing thyroid health with levothyroxine, extreme doses of Vit D to build testosterone, asthma meds, etc. could give them an edge over other teams. I guess that falls under "sports science" in your points.

3) If you get hurt while running on slippery ice that's your fault. Treadmills are there for a reason. Norway is a much colder area and icier in the winter but the Ingebrigtsen somehow don't sprain their ankles in the middle of an important build-up. How they do it? They just do the sensible thing and run on treadmills. No need for a big ego on a slippery, icy day to show how tough someone is, just get on the damn treadmill put a podcast on and grind it out even if it's not fun. If Jakob can do it others can too!

You sound pretty upset that McDonald is faster than TME

plop wrote:

First of all, Tinman isn’t a high mileage team. Team Boss seems to be higher but they’re barely scraping 100 mpw at their peak for 5k guys like McDonald. Ritz’s group (OAC) is at 110 mpw (for Klecker at least) and BTC is at that level or maybe a little higher. I don’t think Team Boss has that much access to high quality facilities, but Tinman does and they’re not doing great either.

BTC are not running 110+ mpw. Only Lomong and Maybe Ahmed and Scott. Centro and Jager are in the 85-95 range. Kincaid & Thompson have had injury problems and is only in the 75-85 range. McGorty and Fisher are there as well. The women are around 80-90 depending on the athlete. Cranny and Sinclair are a bit lower.

I have heard people on these boards say BTC is running over 100 mpw. Show me something where they say that they are. Every interview I have read or podcast that I've listened to have the athletes themselves saying that they are running lower volumes. Schweizer is on Strava, He volume is in the 85-95 range.

The workout volume is very high and the intensity is high too. one strength day each week with 8-10 miles worth of threshold (and a bit faster than threshold). One short speed day. There is a thread out there with this information if you search for it.

Pro women run less than pro men. It’s like Rupp under Salazar, 100-110 mpw + 20 or so more on an AlterG or underwater treadmill.

Guys are running over 100 mpw in the base phase then probably toning it down a bit as the competitive season approaches. You don’t get 5 guys 12:47-13:00 without some high mileage weeks.

-Emma Coburn raced the 5k for the first time since high school. She just ran the second fastest 2 mile in American history so it's not like she's out of form. Probably just not used to focusing for that long a race so she ran below her fitness level.

-Cory McGee left Coogan for Team Boss in like late 2018? (someone can fact check me on this) and since then has gone from 2:01.6-2:00.2, 4:06-4:03, 4:27-4:21. Seems like great improvement there and I would point to her as the best example of improving under Boss.

-Dani Jones has improved in some events (800m and 3k en-route to 2 mile) and in others, she has not gotten the chance to run at BU/Stanford (1500m/5k) in the past year since joining. No really poor results from her, hard to say she's going backwards.

-McDonald ran 2 races in 2020- 4:02 at altitude then 3:37 PB, beating Klecker. Tough that in his other results he has also set PBs (including 2 mile national record) but lost to people like Klecker and Fisher. I will be the first to emphasize that Ws are more important than times, but again it's not like he is getting worse since joining Boss.

-idk how long Tripp Hurt has been there but he ran a pretty big 1500m PB last summer.

-I think Boris Berian was injured when he joined and maybe is still injured now? Idk. No idea about Aisha. But if an athlete gets injured it's not like it's totally the fault of the coach/training group. They will always be part of the sport and you can tell because literally every group from Bowerman to Tinman to OTC to Brooks Beasts to OAC has athletes sidelined at some point.

I'm actually not convinced BTC runs extremely high mileage. On Woody Kincaid's podcast, Ryan Hill mentions not running a step over 90 mpw in his best years. I think their workout volume is high but the high weekly mileage might be over-stated. Probably not true for every member of the team but Jerry seems to have toned it down from the days of Solinsky and Teg running 120-130mpw

Damn this poster beat me to it. Had typed out a response and got distracted before posting it. Anyway +1 to this

This is correct. Good post.

Fisher has good natural speed and fast-twitch fibers. That's one reason he is doing lower mileage, he also did very low mileage in HS.

Schweizer is a slow-twitcher and probably among the highest mileage for women on the team. Quigley for example, when still in the BTC, did less mileage but supplemented a lot of it with swimming sessions.

People overestimate how much mileage elite runners are actually running. And that's already considered their average pace being faster than of mortal recreational runners. They really don't work much more than 8-10 hours of pure running each week. Even in the marathon, Brogan Austin became champion on low mileage (90 mpw, not much for a marathoner).

The exception are Salazar runners like Rupp and Farah who likely were on some drugs (and tons of grey area meds) AND were also running their easy days extremely fast, so they were able to accumulate lots of miles without actually running many hours/week (average easy pace was 5:40/mi or so, average/week prob around 5:20/mile or faster, and at that pace even 100 mpw doesn't take long).

Not really fair to say that Tripp Hurt was DNF for the 5k. If you watched, he was clearly rabbiting and the announcers clearly pointed that out in the broadcast too.

Coburn said she had an off race - it happens from time to time - and was clearly not happy with this performance. I would like to see her able to close things out faster - its something she will need come Tokyo - She seems to have been having some good workouts from what I have seen.

McGee has been pretty close to her PRs at least and I hopefully more focused on peaking in the summer so I think across the board we really need to see how the summer works out before really passing judgement - she looks to be running stronger and I think that is something that was needed.

I don't think anyone can really judge Dani yet - she really hasn't been under the training long enough to understand if it works yet for her - I find that regardless of the switch it does take time to adjust to a different coach and training.

Wasnt Tripp pacing in the race? I thought he was which would explain the DNF

Honestly didnt even realize Boris was in the group until I saw him in a recent video so unsure of how long he has been working with them but he has been injured a ton in the last few years even before he was working with them.

Remains to be seen on Morgan - but he had a bad first race tactically and then ran better the next race sure he lost to Klecker and Hoare but its not like those guys were way behind him - I would say they were pretty close in many of the races they had.

We just dont have a good sample of races to go off of right now so I think its a bit premature to say whether something is working or not