This season was full of surprises for my team, and my top guy. I thought I'd share what we did that led to the improvement listed in the title. Here's a little background on what led up to the huge improvement we saw this season.
2019 Cross
He was the 4th best freshman on our team. Running just under 12 minutes on a flat 2 mile cc course.
2020 Track.
After playing varsity soccer all winter, he had a decent amount of sprinting in his legs. Came out for track and ran 24, 56, 2:12, 5:10 before Covid shut us down.
2021 track season.
This was a sub optimal year. My guy was in shape, to be sure. He was really good about training all during the summer and fall of 2020. He, and the bulk of my team kind of dropped off during December and early January of 2021, because it looked like we weren't going to get to run at all, but then all of a sudden, in my area of CA, we pretty much let every high school sport happen over the course of 4 months. We got to run our first CC race in February and then went straight into track at the end of March. The guy in the title ran a 16:40 3 mile, pretty easily on a slightly rolling course and a 17:24 5k on a slightly tougher course.
Unfortunately for my guy, Soccer and track happened at the same time, so once we went into track season, he was splitting time between two teams. He won our county track meet with a 2:01 in early May, but never was able to improve on that time. Bounced around between 2:06 and 2:03 for the rest of the season.
2021 Cross
We had a pretty good summer of training. He got around 500 total miles. Once a week we did a CV type stimulus OR a tempo run AND we had a long run. Early season, he ran 15:58 at Woodbridge, but then I kind of lost focus with the team's training. I kind of out thought myself and ended up trying to do too much race specific stuff too early. The team faded down the stretch. My guy ran 16:58 on a VERY hard 5k course at our section meet and failed to advance to state. By this point, he was getting a little discouraged. We both had been feeling like he had a lot of potential, but for various reasons, he just wasn't reaching it.
2022 Track.
Once again, he played soccer during the winter. Previously, I had felt like this was an impediment to development, but I've changed my mind. I feel like, for this particular kid, all of the sprinting up and down the field he does during a game was almost a PERFECT pre season program.
Soccer ended in Mid February with a 2nd round playoff loss. 2 weeks later, we had a distance carnival at our school. He went 1:58.6 and 3:29 on a 1200. Obviously, he was weak aerobically, as was indicated by the huge disparity in quality between the 800 and 1200. We made the decision to focus almost exclusively on aerobic development during workouts. His main sessions were:
5-7 x 5 min at about 80-85% vVO2 with 1 min recovery (early on, about 6:00 pace. About 5:40 pace by the end)
4-6 x 3 min at about 90% vVO2 with 1 min recovery (early on, about 5:40 pace. About 5:15-5:20 pace by the end)
4 x 1k at 100% vVO2, with 5 minutes recovery (early on about 3:12-3:15 then 3:00-3:04 by the end)
For most of the season, we did almost no speed endurance workouts. Instead, we ran him in lots of 200s, 400s, and 4x4s in low key meets. We thought this would be a little more fun for him and would allow more of a focus on aerobic development during workouts. He ended up running: 23.85, 50.07, and splitting 48.8 on the relay and scoring a LOT of points for our team
Although we did almost no speed endurance workouts, we touched on some aspect of speed development almost daily, either through focused sprint warm ups with our sprint group, or wicket running, our 50m build ups before workouts. Mid season, I timed him at 3.13 seconds on a 30m fly using a free lap timing system.
His major races, after the 1:58 opener were:
1:56.4 (H) in mid march
1:54.04 in early april
1:55.25 in late april
1:56.77 and 1:54.25 on consecutive days at our section masters meet last weekend
1:52.47 and 1:55.25 on consecutive days at our state meet.
The state finals race was a little disappointing, but in fairness to the athlete, it was the first time where he'd been in a race where everybody was fast. I think mentally he was a little overwhelmed. The first thing he told me when he came off the track was that he wasn't even that tired. After the 1:52 in prelims, we were thinking a 1:51 was in the cards, but it just wasn't to be. We can chalk that up to experience and learn from it as we prepare for his senior year.
