What to do about coach not training athletes correctly.

Buy him a book on training? I don't know how coaches like that are allowed to coach mid/long distance runners. Easy/hard principle has been used since Oregon back in the sixties. Just a simple Google search on the 80/20 principle would teach him enough. SMH.

Explain to the Coach that you are a high level,Coach that has worked with several Olympians and you know what is best.

If that is not the case then stfu and follow the coach’s instructions.

I worked with a guy like that. He went to a clinic given by a speed oriented 800 meter coach. Fortunately as his assistant I was able to convince him otherwise.

Is there any distance runner on the school staff you can reach out to? If not you might have to do mileage on your own (and anonymously give him articles or videos)

sigma grindset wrote:

Buy him a book on training? I don't know how coaches like that are allowed to coach mid/long distance runners. Easy/hard principle has been used since Oregon back in the sixties. Just a simple Google search on the 80/20 principle would teach him enough. SMH.

Better that than the distance types who think sprinters-400 should run lots and lots of long reps. One will undertrain you, the other will overtrain you.

You could add some easy miles on your own, and maybe slow down a bit on some of the workouts if the coach is having you do hard repeats every day. Possibly talk to him about running them as long strides every other day? I dunno

My HS ended class just after 2pm, and track practice started at 3:15. My coach had me doing around 20mpw as a 400/800 kid. My 800 only came down to 2:03 even though I could run 50 sec 400 -- in retrospect, instead of goofing around with my friends between class and practice, I should have gone out for an easy run every day. I could have been running 40mpw instead of 20.

calling it now wrote:

Explain to the Coach that you are a high level,Coach that has worked with several Olympians and you know what is best.

If that is not the case then stfu and follow the coach’s instructions.

You overestimate the average high school coach

tried that, ran 11:56 in a 3200 and 5:15 in 1600. horrible for me. thanks for the response

I think my coach is an amazing coach, he’s coached many great runners in the 800 and 400. just not fair he has to coach distance and he’s never ran that. I’ve talked to my xc coach, but the thing is a can’t ignore his workouts so I wanted to see if there was a schedule I could present to him. I’ll present how other top runners in my field do their training, Thank you.

calling it now wrote:

Explain to the Coach that you are a high level,Coach that has worked with several Olympians and you know what is best.

If that is not the case then stfu and follow the coach’s instructions.

You suck and are part of the reason most HS programs suck.

I was in this situation JR year and tore my hamstring out of “respect to my coaches”. I knew that the training was awful at that point, but chose to shut up about it, put my head down, and do the work. It resulted in me losing most of my junior season and an off and on injury that lasted the rest of my high school career. The majority of coaches and people in general are either too lazy or too prideful to learn about the methods that actually work.

Summer of senior year we chanced upon the entire summer training program of a team that competes to win at NXN year after year. When we presented it to our coach he said “this is (team)s program, not ours.” And continued to make us run 25 mpw of intervals every week, and resulted in extremely mediocre/poor results as per usual.

Wow your post speaks volumes.

1. You did not believe in your Coach.

2. You were searching for alternative workouts.

3. Your HS coach’s workouts didn’t work for someone that didn’t believe in the coach or his workouts.

4. You blame the Coach for your injury rather than looking in the mirror.

Any outsider could of predicted failure from you and your attitude no matter what the Coach did or didn’t t do.

cmg2005 wrote:

Are there any schedules my teammates and I can present to the coach that will allow us to improve more?

pretty much any schedule. just kidding.

Take an example week from our training:

M 10x400 mile pace w/ 400 jog recovery

T 30-40 min easy

W 10 min easy 30 min tempo 10 min easy

T 30-40 min easy

F 30 min easy + strides

S 60-90 min long run

S off

throw in some weight training/strength and it's pretty solid. mix it up a little, also. try alternating with hills once in a while.

calling it now wrote:

Wow your post speaks volumes.

1. You did not believe in your Coach.

2. You were searching for alternative workouts.

3. Your HS coach’s workouts didn’t work for someone that didn’t believe in the coach or his workouts.

4. You blame the Coach for your injury rather than looking in the mirror.

Any outsider could of predicted failure from you and your attitude no matter what the Coach did or didn’t t do.

Why believe in a coach that doesn’t believe in or give a crap about how you perform? The day my perspective of my coach shifted is when I asked them what specific training could help me on the last 200m of an 800m and they said to just be more mentally tough. End of conversation. Why did this change my perspective? Because instead of receiving an answer from my coach I had to then go do my own research on energy systems, training philosophy etc. because I most certainly wasn’t gonna get that from my coach.

For the record, the training hasn’t been seeming to go well for those that believed in the coach either. Injuries and burnout across the board, regardless of faith in the coach.

You can’t just believe 200 400 and 800 repeats at unrealistic paces and no recovery days will make you fast. That’s not how the world works, and that’s not how physiology works.

And with the injury: I did every single last thing the coaches told me to do exactly. The day I tore that hamstring I specifically told them I was severely sore and extremely fatigued, and asked if I should take a day off or a recovery day as I was worried about getting hurt. They told me to do the workout and I did the workout. The workout just so happened to be 1600-800-400-3200 at race effort for all of the above.

Trust me, I now have a competent coach that actually cares for my success and the difference is night and day.

I think we got baited man

sigma grindset wrote:

I don't know how coaches like that are allowed to coach mid/long distance runners.

They pay us $3000 for 6 months of work. They don't care about our sport. That's all it is. If you have a pulse and don't creep on the kids you are good to go.

I don’t believe you.

Go ahead and post your great successes.

You are a cry baby that couldn’t handle failures.

cmg2005 wrote:

Not sure what to do about this one and I always see this website on google with answered questions.

I run distance (3200, 1600) and my track coach doesn't really know how to coach that. We run 400s and 200s and the only mileage we ever get is from the one mile warmup. We run sprints from the day we get off of our break after xc. Are there any schedules my teammates and I can present to the coach that will allow us to improve more?

Ask your coach if you can run extra mlieage.

The public school advocates telling you that you should listen to the coach at your neighborhood school regardless of their merits are complete fools. If your coach has no clue (or doesn’t want to deal with different groups of kids training at different distances), find one that has a clue. The coach at the neighborhood school my kids run for has no clue and has never coached talent like my kids. She has them run 1.5-2 miles per day (they race about 2 miles) and they stretch a do form drills for twenty minutes. The school across town has the kids run 5-6 miles per day. You can guess which team wins most the meets (my kids place well primarily based on talent and due to soccer training).

calling it now wrote:

Explain to the Coach that you are a high level,Coach that has worked with several Olympians and you know what is best.

If that is not the case then stfu and follow the coach’s instructions.

This is a dumb comment. There are lots of terrible coaches out there and a committed runner can easily find out if their coach is incompetent.

Change schools to one that has a program that doesn't suck for distance. The only other option may be to have to train on your own before school or after practice and suffer through the bs. Coaches that are receptive to learning training theory generally have enough common sense to know that intervals every day is a pretty poor training method for distance in almost every case.