What do you wish high school distance coaches taught/did more of?

Other than the 2×200, the workout described in your 3rd paragraph is very common. The coach has zero control over how hard you run intervals. On my teams, there always guys that trashed themselves trying to keep up with faster runners and others that always ran within themselves. It was a function of their personalities and the coach had minimal influence.

99.9 percent of all high schoolers come into the season straight from the couch. The season is too short to develop anything, so that second workout you mentioned is really the only thing that can help. It either breaks a person, or gives them a sliver of possibility to run well at some point.

That said, the answer here is more mileage, slower. It wouldn't kill most high schoolers to go out for 8, 10 or 12 miles on Sundays, at 8 minute or so pace.

Were this to happen in early-June each year, this would be even better.

I agree with your statement, we had mostly guys do that, I even fell victim to it a few times my senior year. I just believe that it was necessary for her to give us so many workouts, with little not to many easy days/weeks and training though meets. I still like my coaches as people, but I just didn't agree with some of their training methods.

This is Jim Kiler wrote:

99.9 percent of all high schoolers come into the season straight from the couch. The season is too short to develop anything, so that second workout you mentioned is really the only thing that can help. It either breaks a person, or gives them a sliver of possibility to run well at some point.

That said, the answer here is more mileage, slower. It wouldn't kill most high schoolers to go out for 8, 10 or 12 miles on Sundays, at 8 minute or so pace.

Were this to happen in early-June each year, this would be even better.

I agree with this. We didn't run anywhere near enough when I was in high school. We did maybe 25-30 miles on a heavy week. Intervals or a race just about every weekday with an invitational/nothing over the weekend.

Agreed, our coaches never really told us to run more than 7-8 miles. The most I got up to was 10 miles, and I thought that should have been the max amount of mileage for a long run for our best guys. Like I said I wasn't one of the best, but I sure ran more mileage than them, I just didn't get the oppuritny to continently put in 30-40 mile weeks. And before anyone ask why I wasn't doing that during the summer, its because I didn't have the knowledge that I have now of running. It took me a long time to realize what the right way for me to train was.

a few thoughts:

- consistent solid mileage beats killer workouts. most kids would benefit way more from doing 30-40+ mpw in the offseason than various go-to-the-well interval workouts or elaborate weight and core routines.

- related to the above, mile repeats at anything faster than tempo pace is counterproductive for HS kids (and most people). jack daniels talks about this but it seems to get ignored. we did mile repeats at race pace several times a season and it was obviously pretty tough. you get away with it for kids because they have recovery superpowers. but that day would almost certainly be better spend doing 1000s at I pace or miles at tempo pace.

- even splits! yes, this might mean you're way back in the first mile of XC because high school kids are dumb and excitable. it took me 30 years to really figure this out. i ran a lot of ridiculously paced races in HS and college.

- the huge gains you make just from going through puberty (for guys at least) are not gonna be sustainable through college. this is directed mostly at myself, but i know i'm not alone in getting discouraged when i got to college expecting to keep improving just from maturity, only to find i ran about the same as i did my senior year of HS.

My coach senior year was completely out of touch with recovery and training required for proper mid-d and distance development. Here’s was a typical week looked like going into track season (maybe it was for the better that I missed senior season)

Monday: 8x800m Shoot for mile-2 mile race pace off of 2 minutes rest

Tuesday: bleachers with 300m at 2 mile pace for recovery?

Wednesday: 4 miles “power run” top guys shooting for sub 6:00 pace (we did about 7:30 hehe)

Thursday: 400-800-1600-3200 at 90% race effort. Yeah.

Friday: 3 miles recovery

Coaches philosophy? We are training to run 2 miles and under. Therefor we should always maintain intensity and never do much more than 2 miles of running cause it would be slow and pointless. You were considered a god if you broke 11:00 in the 3200 on that team.

Replace static stretching with dynamic warm ups/drills and a focus on active range of motion instead of static stretching. Too many HS kids hurt themselves by over stretching and/or not being properly warmed up for hard efforts and races.

Hills, hills and more hills. HS kids do not do enough work on hills. XC coaches tend to be afraid of dedicating a lot of time to hills because they want metrics from workouts to check improvement. Hills are very important for young runners as it is great for building form and getting glutes firing.

The above comments about kids coming off the couch for their first practice are spot on. Very few HS XC programs have any sort of periodization. Kids show up and are just thrown in to see who sinks and who swims.

Since most cross country athletes also run the distances in track, coaches should be running a year round program for these athletes. Hold regular off season practices, give the athletes a weekly plan to follow, and work around dumb archaic rules set by sports administrators that only think about ball sports. I assure you that the top programs like Newbury Park don't let their athletes sit on the couch for months between seasons.

-Build to 50ish miles a week

-Nearly all workouts keep to tempos

-Only 2-3 invite races

It’s really not that hard if keep to those things

Badger Runz wrote:

what would you wish high school coaches would teach more of, or do more often?

How to get the girls! There was some real high quality girls on the team, but I was too focused on running.

It was hard for me to believe that you shouldn't do static stretching before a workout since I did that since the start of high school. Wish I would have known this from the start, I ended up over stretching a hamstring at one point during my sophomore year of track.

Agreed, we didn't have practice until a few weeks before both track and cross country started. So only the dedicated ones would run during the off season.

They should date the students LESS. Way less. Like never.

Our cross country coach is great. For the runners who care and want to get better we start summer training two weeks after track season so our bodies can rest. We start off doing long runs and easy mileage, with one run (Saturday or Sunday) being a quarter of our weekly mileage. We build 5 percent each week for like 3-4 weeks then take an easy week where we cut back a bit and then ramp it up again. During this time we don't do much speed work, but this year we have started doing fartlek's once a week, normally Tuesday and then tempo runs (our longest was 40 mins) on Thursday. Before cross country season we cross train for a week so we can rest a bit and then get back into it. We still build during the cross country season but taper towards the end of the season. Our coach is great, he made a spreadsheet for us to track our weekly mileage and he also made a individualized pace chart with our 5K goal times. He puts sections to show us our (percentage effort), for example what 80% of that goal pace would be and we use that for our workouts. We had problems with strength and finishing our races so this year we have been doing way more tempo runs. All in all we have around 50 boys and girls on the team and we've seen massive improvements thanks to our coach and the effort he puts in. Last thing too, every race he puts our first mile time, our average pace and our race time in a spreadsheet so we can see the improvement, even adjusts what our estimated 5k time would be if the course was too long or too short

This is exactly want I want to do if I ever become a coach. I've been thinking about making a spreadsheet like that to really visualize paces, workouts, etc. to my runners. You're lucky you have such a great coach.

For early in the training doing more progression runs for workouts (keep it easy for 4-6 miles and pushing it for 2-3 miles). Emphasis on keeping the easy runs easy. If someone 5k PB pace is 5:40 per mile there's no reason they should be going under 7 minute miles for easy runs. 7:30 should be the fastest any high school XC should go. And more fartlek/tempo type of workouts for XC. Gets them ready for the changes in pace in XC and builds up the strength. Ie for a 4 mile tempo throw in a good minute surge every k or whenever they hit a certain tree or telephone pole or short fartlek like a Mona fartlek where you build up to keeping the off part steady and not a jog. Especially for high school kids racing a lot fartlek runs can do wonders as far as preventing them from over doing it during the season. And lastly basic short speed work with full recovery ie short explosive hill sprints and 150m reps, especially if they look to be over cooking it.

Great responses everyone. The best plan for HSers is the same as the best plan for everyone—see link below.

What matters to running performance, in descending order of importance:

1. Total volume

2. Volume of easy running

3. Tempo or threshold sessions.

4. Short speed.

That’s it!

Same emphasis for Ingebrigstens and McSweyn.

As yeshua noted above, hard mile repeats and gut busting interval sessions are neutral at best, damaging at worst.

Personal anecdotes:

1. I did volume and tempo/threshold only while coaching myself leading into my senior year of HS track. First mile race 4:17. The rest of the season was under the direction of the HS coach, nothing but gut busting intervals. Season PR 4:16. All that stressful work did basically nothing.

2. My D1 college coach gave us mostly hard mile repeats and other vo2 max stuff. No threshold. Too fast on “easy” days. Low mileage. Result: massive underperformance and injuries team-wide.

Read and learn:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31045681/

It's not at all my coaches' fault, but I wish I'd better understood the impact running over the summer had. They always told us to, and emphasized it quite a bit, but I'd still run for like a week in June then stop until XC season started, and then I'd spend the entire season getting back into shape.