I have actually told him the pace he is running at is geared more towards a marathon build up. I thought that since we were training for 5k, we should be stressing the aerobic system a bit more since the 5k is more intense.
I have actually told him the pace he is running at is geared more towards a marathon build up. I thought that since we were training for 5k, we should be stressing the aerobic system a bit more since the 5k is more intense.
I'm no expert, but if you're having him do tempos and speed workouts, and he's doing them with the proper pace and intensity, shouldn't the rest of his training be purely aerobic, in zones 1 and 2? If so, it sounds like that's what he's doing.
Plus, some people run their zone 1 right one the borderline of zone 2. Other people run it much slower and at a much lower heart rate. Ultimately, if those extra slow zone 1 and 2 days are allowing him to recover and hit his paces in his workouts, then what is the problem exactly?
To key off of this, a good compromise may be to require a harder steady state run once every week or two just to build that longer aerobic engine. 8:00 miles are fine if you have the athlete doing a 6-8 miler at 5:50-6:00 pace fairly regularly. I do agree anything much slower than 8:00 is starting to get excessively slow though. I think lots of athletes and sometimes coaches make the mistake of going “oh no! 8:00 miles!?” But have no issue with 7:45-7:50s like it isn’t basically the same thing.
It’s slow but some people need to do that in order to hit workout paces. Daniel’s easy pace always seemed on the fast side to me. I predict this kid won’t peak early and will get a lot faster when the hard work comes. Summer is time to train to train. Kid seems smart. Let him run his easy on his easy days.
I would cut the kid a little slack. At least he is out there doing some running over the summer and not sitting around at home playing video games all day. Sure it would be good if he was a few harder runs but at least he is base building for the XC season. Once that season starts then some more intense workouts can begin and he will probably be in good shape to handle the work load without getting injured.
I probably should have been training more with a little more mileage but I broke through when I did my runs at 7:00 pace and two track workouts a week. When I had a really good I'd do 6:30 pace easily. Occasionally I would take a day or two off but I should have just done shorter runs at 8:00 pace instead. Variety is good. I was seconds away from breaking 16 that season.