Our xc coach’s plan for summer build is to only run easy mileage with beginning of season goal to have faster easy pace? Does this make any sense?
if that doesn’t make sense - he wants guys that run 7:50-8 min mile easy runs with current pbs around 20 mins (5k) to just be able to run ‘easy’ runs faster
Welcome to the American running system:
Oh, you’re a slow runner? Do this training to keep being slow.
you’re a fast runner? Here are some workouts to run fast.
just a kid wrote:
Our xc coach’s plan for summer build is to only run easy mileage with beginning of season goal to have faster easy pace? Does this make any sense?
if that doesn’t make sense - he wants guys that run 7:50-8 min mile easy runs with current pbs around 20 mins (5k) to just be able to run ‘easy’ runs faster
Training specificity is everything: train to sprint long distance easily.
just a kid wrote:
Our xc coach’s plan for summer build is to only run easy mileage with beginning of season goal to have faster easy pace? Does this make any sense?
if that doesn’t make sense - he wants guys that run 7:50-8 min mile easy runs with current pbs around 20 mins (5k) to just be able to run ‘easy’ runs faster
If after a summer of running more, those kids times have dropped to 19mins, wouldn't you expect them to be able to do easy runs faster?
And most kids can get a lot faster over 5k by getting some more miles on their legs. A summer of running 10-20mpw more than last season with some strides had most of us running with in 20s of the end of year times for most of the juniors and seniors.
I don’t think that’s necessarily a good plan. That will lead to kids pushing harder than they need to on these runs to keep “improving”, but they will absolutely suffer in the 5k because they aren’t doing the Vo2Max and threshold work needed to run a good 5k. At the end of the summer you guys are going to feel like you are sprinting running at 5:00-6:00 mile pace in races and you’ll go lactic way too quick.
Improving easy pace doesn’t improve your fitness, it’s the other way around. I know a guy that never broke 18 in the 5k despite feeling like it was necessary to “win” on all of the easy days and hit 6:30-6:50 miles all of the time. All of the kids running 7:30s to 8:00s on our easy days always ended up beating him in actual races. Some by minutes.
A better suggestion would be to keep the easy days easy, no pressure to hit any sort of pace, and then have a fartlek/short interval day along with a tempo day where you focus on improving week to week either in volume or pace.
just a kid wrote:
Our xc coach’s plan for summer build is to only run easy mileage with beginning of season goal to have faster easy pace? Does this make any sense?
if that doesn’t make sense - he wants guys that run 7:50-8 min mile easy runs with current pbs around 20 mins (5k) to just be able to run ‘easy’ runs faster
Yes this makes sense. Doing a lot of easy running makes your easy pace faster. By easy people generally mean at or below 70% max heart rate. So say right now running 90 minutes at around that heart rate you average 9:00 pace. Then after a few months of doing a lot of miles of that then you might be able to run 8:30 or 8:00 at that same heart rate, which is "easy". And all of that is done without even coming close to injuring yourself or over training. And plus all that time on your feet makes your bones and tendons tougher so you're less injury prone and you recover faster.