Is "The Michigan" workout too hard for a high school track team to run during race week?

No. It’s a good early season strength workout.

(With just enough speed to make it a really nice workout for this transitional time of the track season.)

Great workout for a buildup. Dumb idea during race week.

Yes it is a collegiate 10k cross country workout. Not only that, but it's meant to be a race day simulator. That was the original intent by it's designer. Obviously, there are lots of people that copy and tweak the workout to fit their needs, but in doing so, are not doing the Michigan. Doing a "soft" version early season in highschool isn't a terrible idea. None of the early races should matter and strength building would take priority. Doing a "hard" version early season would make zero sense.

To piggyback: please do not replicate workouts done by older runners who likely are running more mileage for younger, less experienced runners.

I'm interested to hear what everyone's Michigan looked like when they ran them. Or even if you ran multiple versions.

We used to do one that was warm up - hard mile - 3 miles steady - hard 1200 - 3 miles steady - hard 800 - cool down. For a total of 10+ miles. Once the warm up started, we never stopped moving. Off/early season.

My high school coach trained under Warhurst in the early 2000s. He had us run the Michigan twice in the late summer every season. One or two years we also ran it a third time in the late season, I think prior to our conference meet?
If I remember correctly, he had us run the Michigan during one or two track seasons, and then in later years changed it out for a different but similar workout (that I can't remember the specifics of, but I remember it involving 1000s).

When we ran the Michigan, there were two variations. Most of the team would run a standard Michigan- 1600, 1200, 800, 400 (paces: ~10k, 5k, mile, all out), with 1.25 mile tempos between. There was always a short (~100m walk/jog) rest between track reps and tempo reps. People new to the sport would cut out the 1600 and first 1.25 mile tempo, starting with the 1200 instead. This included most freshmen, and often anyone coming back from injury.

Since I left the program his teams have one the state meet at least twice, and he's had at least one runner take the state title. With that said, I'm not sure if he still uses it as a regular part of his programming.

I remember back when the boards would respond to questions like this by suggesting the athlete talk to their coach to understand more, with the idea of building trust in the coach/program, rather than getting worked up by talking to morans on a message board.

That said, I don't know this coach's plan, but this early in the season doesn't seem like a terrible time to have a strength workout like this on the same week as a race, assuming they're training through all of their races right now. If they're trying to race fresh in March/April, I'd be curious to know why.

Depends on (a) what exactly you ran (there are lots of variations on the Michigan), (b) how fit you and your teammates are, and (c) how hard you ran it.

Just because a workout has a name doesn't mean it has magical powers. The classic Michigan has 4000m of intervals on the track (which is nothing crazy) and 3+ miles of tempo (which is also nothing crazy, assuming you keep the tempo under control).

For an inexperienced high school runner, that's still probably more than ideal. On the other hand, for a team that's been training consistently (putting in, say, 30-40 miles a week), it's doable. And if it's modified (e.g. shortening or slowing down the tempo sections), then it's just another workout. There are lots of stories about incredible Michigans done by runners like Nick Willis and Nate Brannen and so on, but that doesn't mean it always has to involve crazy race-intensity efforts.

Anyone who trained under the old Oregon system probably did versions of the 800/300 workout (i.e. 800 hard, 300 jog, 300 hard, 200 jog, repeat as desired). We would do it early season with, say, 5 sets and relaxed paces. We would also do it late season, maybe 3 sets, with the last 800 getting down to mile pace or below - i.e. similar intensity as the Michigan. The purpose and suitability of the workout depended on how we ran it at a given time.

The Michigan is way too complicated. Most coaches don’t understand how it works and just hand it out because it sounds impressive. It wouldn’t be a bad tapering workout. Try bring the reps up to 10k pace and make sure the tempo efforts are true threshold pace and not run all out.

Wild. I think we went to high school together.

In case the wide variety of sample workouts already listed in this thread hasn’t already demonstrated, “The Michigan” is not a standard workout, or anything close. Loosely speaking, I think most people will take it to mean some combination of interval work, with LT/threshold/tempo work rolled into some longer recoveries. The value of that kind of workout, as I see it, is equal parts race simulation and transition between late base season and the early part of racing season. I was in pretty regular communication with one of the U Oregon runners during that 2005-2010 period and they did 2k-1600-1200-800 at 5-10k pace on a track with 2k LT pace recovery on trails (about 60 second walk between track and trail). But they ran that workout 2-3 times almost exclusively in late August through early October. It wasn’t meant to be a ball-buster, just good solid volume with mixed paces to bridge the gap between base and xc.

I guess lots a successful programs use it and lots do not. So don't do it if you think like me and do it if like that kind of stuff.

Go Blue.

Pretty possible! I was #8 in cross the year I graduated in 11/12.

The Michigan workout is pretty simple to understand although Ron never really explained it to us walk-ons back in the day. Yes, Michigan used to allow walk-ons and those days are gone. I finally understood what was going on when I read Lear's book on Alan Webb's days at Michigan as Lear explained the workout as per Warhurst or whomever.

Basically it was meant to simulate a 10k race. You would start out with a mile on the track which was supposed to be similar to your first mile of the race - faster than average race pace in order to get out from the pack. As opposed to recent Michigan workouts that I've seen on youtube, we never stopped to rest. We did jog easy from the finish of the mile to the parking lot next to the track (about 200 meters total) and that was to group back up. From there we would pick up the pace for a loop around the football stadium and back to the track - about 1.5 miles (It appears they no longer run this stadium loop and run a loop elsewhere). In addition a portion of the stadium loop was uphill and a portion of it was downhill so it wasn't a flat loop by any means.

We would run easy for about 200 meters to get back to the start line on the track and to group back up - and did this after and before each track portion. And I think you had to go through a gate to get on and off the track at the time so there were some obstacles to maintaining pace throughout.

Unfortunately, I never wore a watch in college so I can't report on the pace for the stadium loop but since the workout was supposed to simulate a 10k race - the 1.5 mile loop around the stadium was probably very near 10k race pace. I don't recall Ron nor Heik giving us stadium loop splits either. They would just give times for the track portions of the workout.

Then we would typically do 1200m on the track - another stadium loop - 800m on the track - another stadium loop and then a 400m finish.

The 1200 and 800m were supposed to simulate surges in the race and the last 400m was supposed to simulate the finish of the race. And sometimes we would change the order of the 1200 and 800m portions for variety.

I realize that the Michigan workout is liquid and flexible and has changed over time. This is what I recall from the late 80s and early 90s. As far as - is this a good high school workout - if you run it exactly as I described - it's basically an almost all out effort for over 6 miles so I'm not sure that this would be the most effective use of your energy in training for the 800 through 3200m races. It's probably expending way too much energy on a workout designed for a XC 10k. Mentally, it might result in a huge confidence blow when you quit early or crawl across the final finish line.

With all that being said, I would think that most high school coaches would throw in a bunch of rest after each interval and then you are talking about an entirely different workout than I recall.

And I forgot, I remember running this as a freshman and thinking that all hard workouts I had previously done in high school did not hold a candle to this.

And we ran this several times throughout XC and track seasons. I want to say we ran it ad nauseum throughout those seasons but during the winter we rarely did it just because Ann Arbor got so much snow.

We are in High school. To clarify the coach had the entire team from new Freshman to Seniors run the full Michigan in its original form on a Monday. We had planned races for us that Wednesday and Saturday. We've been racing here in the South since March, 1st so we are not early season. Many of us are already going for PRs and some are coming off of injury from previous XC and indoor requirements.