Planning training Microcycles and Mesocycles

Looks pretty good to me… most kids should do fine with this…. Some 400s and 800s after week 4 would be good…. You could probably wait even til week 6 before adding some of that depending on when indoor starts and when they need to be sharp.

Or…

Give them November off, nothing but distance runs, strides, and weights in December and January and start workouts in February.

HS programs with 4 month long indoor seasons are ridiculous.

I’m not sure what you are training for but if it’s distance I would change a few things. I wouldn’t do four hard workouts per week. I think that’s a pretty common trap that a lot of coaches fall into. I would do two workouts, a long run and then the other days would be mileage each week.

The only stuff that seems iffy to me is the LT/Tempo work. In my experience, a lot of tempo running for high schoolers just kinda happens, so instead of telling kids they are doing a tempo run, I just set up a normal day but tell them they are aloud to push the pace a little but not race it if they want to.

They get the same LT stimulus. If you tell them to do LT intervals, they will likely start each one at 5k race pace and blow the workout.

miles on miles wrote:

Looks pretty good to me… most kids should do fine with this…. Some 400s and 800s after week 4 would be good…. You could probably wait even til week 6 before adding some of that depending on when indoor starts and when they need to be sharp.

First indoor meet in about a month with the second one a week after. I would have held out from these but the head coach wants to race these. Indoor State first week of February.

window seat wrote:

Or…

Give them November off, nothing but distance runs, strides, and weights in December and January and start workouts in February.

HS programs with 4 month long indoor seasons are ridiculous.

I think they'll be okay to train through indoor as long as I don't push too much with workouts. I don't think they'll burn out from fartlek/tempo training.

coachy wrote:

I’m not sure what you are training for but if it’s distance I would change a few things. I wouldn’t do four hard workouts per week. I think that’s a pretty common trap that a lot of coaches fall into. I would do two workouts, a long run and then the other days would be mileage each week.

That's pretty much my current plan from the way I view it. The day with the 200's are essentially just longer strides, and the MLR is just a longer easy run with some alactic sprints instead of strides after. I may dial back the speed a bit if I think its fatigues them but I think it actually helps their legs feel sharp so far.

A lot of different ways to do it. This is just far away from how I would do it for high school distance runners running the mile and 2 mile.