HS coaches, do lots of intervals with your newbies

Ping Pong Prince wrote:

How do you determine whether a kid has developed into enough of an athlete to start "real training"? Is there a certain time they should be able to break for the 800m or 1600m?

If they haven't developed over the course of a season to athlete status, how do you modify your plan to get them there?

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You will know. " Some" gifted lets say runners, can run long - steady- runs and do them forever...encourage them! Smile now you know he might not be there, but can get a state champ on your hands to develop to run the 400m & 800m race/time trial.

CoachB wrote:

There, I said it.

Flame away

Most will not understand the nuance of what you're saying, but yes 100% agree. This is what I gravitated towards over the years and did extensively the last summer before I lost my job due to a coup d'etat led by the head track coach who was close friends with the AD.

We would do a light warmup of about 1 mile total distance, running for about 200 meters and then walking about 100 meters so there was no real aerobic tax happening. This would start off with a slow jog and progressively get a little quicker each 200. Then about ten 40-50 meter strides over home made mini-hurdles with each one getting quicker. After that we'd do something like 6-8 x 400 or 5-6 x 600 or 3-4 x 800, and have 3 groups led by returners. The newbies were told to self-select which group they wanted to run with. The fastest group of boys and girls would run around 6:30 pace, next group 7:30 pace and last group around 8:30 pace.

That concluded the workout for the new kids, who started out doing this monday, tuesday, thursday and friday and would add one more day of training in every two weeks so long as they weren't breaking down up until they could handle six days a week like returners. What served as the workout (listed above) for the new kids was a nice warmup for the returners, who would then go do their workout of more typical non-interrupted running. By the time the new kids could handle a sixth day of training, that meant they were showing up on Saturday which was our longer day. We would still do the initial warmup of a mile of on-and-off, then the strides, but then their workout was one continuous run, typically about 3 miles for their first-ever Saturday and adding on about .5-1 mile each week until they were doing about 5-7 miles for their continuous long run (that would typically have some easier tempo mixed in to keep them more engaged) by the end of summer.

What I found is this led to significantly less injuries, faster racing during the season, higher retention rate, better team bonding between new runners and returners and overall a happier more successful team.

Obviously the key is that doing those intervals at 6:30, 7:30 and 8:30 pace is nothing like what most people think of when doing intervals. They were not gut-wrenching high lactate affairs by any means. It's just long enough to make them suffer a little bit, but short enough almost any new runner can stay focused and feel like they accomplished what their coach asked of them.

Brilliant.

Makes sense with very young undeveloped athletes.

Think about games kids play like capture the flag etc. Basically free flowing fartleks. Kids don't just slog for 30 minutes for fun.

Here's how you do it:

7-8th grade: Have an XC Day, where one day, you have a 2 mile race even though you have no cross country program, and have it in the late fall.

High school: Have a 6 a.m. practice day one, and have the upperclassmen hammer a four mile run, leaving everyone behind. Then run eight 800s in the afternoon.

Oh, and day one at CU have the incoming freshmen run Mesa Trail from the fieldhouse, drilling it all the way.

nonezero wrote:

Interesting, by your calculation (10 laps easy in 20 mins) most kids should just do intervals until they can do 8:30 miles as their easy pace.

I feel like there are a ton of crossfitters who can barely run 10 min easy miles. They don't have that much fat to lose and they already do sprint intervals quite a bit but still have zero endurance. I don't know if they'd ever get down to 8:30 on intervals alone.

10 laps easy in 20 minutes might have been overstating the program. SOME kids will be able to do 10 laps in 20 minutes but others might be 9.5 or even 9 before they go out on the roads. Some of the girls might be more like 8 laps before they go out. What I'm really looking for is if they can run comfortably for 20 minutes. For most newbies, 20 minutes continuous is WAY harder than say 4 x 3 minutes at 90% vVO2.

This is how our first week went for the beginners

M: WU, extensive focus on A run mechanics (we'll build in more drills later). 5 stations of mobility running, slaloms which require kids to change directions and run in all directions. Jay Johnson's SAM 2 easy

Wed: Warm up jog, same drills, 3 x 50m acceleration, focusing on mechanics, 6 minute run for distance, 400m CD, SAM 2

Thu: Warm up, the same drills, 3 x 50, 4 x 3 minutes @ 90% of the previous day's test pace, 400 CD. 12 min circuit of body weight stuff (burpies, push ups, crunches, etc...)

The top newbie boy went about 1450 on his 6 minute test. Based on the pace charts we use, this means he should be going about 650m for his 3 minute intervals. We have cones set out on the track every 50m, so it's really easy for kids to tell how far they've gone. The boys hit their paces, said the workout was pretty easy, and left the track ready for more next week.

I told them that we'd do 2 more 6 minute tests before the end of summer and that if they improved by 50m each time, they'd be doing a great job. Some of them will improve far more. I suspect that the boy described above will hit 1600m at the end of the summer and end up going low 12, high 11 for 2 miles in cross. I'd call that a successful first 5 months, if it actually plays out that way.

CoachB wrote:

There, I said it.

Flame away

CoachB, and others who posted in support - you are right on the mark.

I came into the support when I played soccer in Junior high. My coach believed to be your best in soccer you have to be fit as hell. Every day we started practice with running laps around the field, which just happened to be a little longer than a quarter mile. One of my teammates, Otto Mazzoni, made every days run into a race. I think at first we started out with 8 laps, then increased a bit each week. Eventually we were running 20 laps, lapping everyone at least once, most of them twice. This was in early 70s soccer shoes, which were leather and difficult to break in. The surface was mostly grass but a lot of it was dirt and clay.

After the run, we ran wind sprints, perhaps 40 yards. Then we did ball handling drills. After that half field scrimmages. Finally 40 yard wind sprints.

We did this every day and were completely drained afterwards. But we recovered .. and got stronger.

That's how I got started. By the time I got to high school I was already accustomed to the work required to become successful in cross country and track. Otto set the State record in the 2mile in 1972. I broke Otto's record the next year. Both of our times would remain as the fastest 2 miles in State Meet history today except that a 23 year old grown man from Ethiopia beat our times about 10-15 years ago...

Imagine a highschool football or wrestling coach being so soft.... They'd get fired

need to build vo2 max quickly though - they have to be running <10 minute miles

It wasn't the mileage it was doing too much too soon.