4x300 @ 43, 800 prediction

Yesterday we did 5 x 800 with 4 min recovery. 2:31, 2:31, 2:28, 2:27, 2:21. He was working pretty hard on the last one.

I think that every time I have him step on the track, it's going to be race specific. He'd been on a slow build for a cross country season that took forever to arrive for 9 months. I think he's got plenty of tempo stuff, cruise intervals, CV, short max sprints.....in the bank to hold him over for a while. Maybe 2-3 tempo runs over the next 5-7 weeks just to maintain some lactate clearance ability.

Interestingly, the day after our cross country season ended, he signed up for the last 3 weeks of the JV football season. He's 6'3 and can 2 handed dunk and ran 24.2 FAT the first time he ever tried a 200. I'm hoping that he doesn't start getting dreams of being the next Megatron. He'll get in the final game of the season and the coach said he's going to have the QB thrown him a fade to see what happens.

He's going to play on the soccer team concurrently with the track team as well, so any truly fast times will be nice, but not fully expected. Managing the workload is going to be critical.

His best chance for fast competition will be 5/7. I think I'm going to have him try the 1600 at that meet. It's our county meet and there are a couple of decent (sub 4:30) guys that he can try to just hang on to. Most of his races for us will probably be 800 and 4x400.

Update.

The same week of spring break, he decided that he would play jv football for the last 2 weeks of the season AND play soccer. So, he went from the workout listed above, to a soccer practice, to a football practice. A few days later he's like, Coach, my quad hurts....duh.

He really didn't end up doing a whole lot of actual training this spring. He'd go from soccer game to track meet, and soccer practices with an occasional easy run thrown in. Something was always hurting. Mostly a quad and a calf gave him problems.

He ended up going 52 for the open 400 with zero competition (next guy in his heat was 59). And ran a 2:01, a 2:06, then finished with a 2:03. I was honestly expecting something like 2:10 for the race where he went 2:03. He literally had done zero running training for almost 2 weeks by that point, and his gate was kind of lopsided because his quad was hurting. I kind of didn't want him to run it, but he's got the summer to get himself right at this point. He has a few more soccer games to play and then will take it easy for a while.

We're looking for maybe a sub 15:30 at woodbridge to start the season and then maybe sub 16:30 by the time state rolls around to Woodward Park.

Coach, thanks for the update. Always appreciate finding out how things actually went.