Training plan until track season --> Middle distance, baby {1500m}

Find the Summer of Malmo. Make it the Winter of Malmo.

And get plenty of sleep. More than you think you need. "One year of growth equals two years of coaching"--and almost all your growth takes place when you're asleep.

Yeah, I'm trying to work on sleep

Does anyone know how many weeks I should be in each periodized cycle? Someone told me the base should be at least 3 months, should I go more if my goal race is June? And also, when should I ramp up intensity in the base period? (more tempo, etc)

What runs do you guys do until track season? has anyone done quicker threshold intervals on track?

I'm assuming cross is done for you now?

Take a little time to recover, trust me, you'll thank yourself later on. Could be a few days off, could be a week or two, could be active rest if you enjoy doing other activities. Just make sure that when you get back to running, you're ready to go.

Since you're talking about running 1500m, you need to get really good at running hard for 3 minutes. If you can get 3 minutes in to a 4 minute race and still feel relatively good, you're well positioned to race that last minute.

You can build up to this in a number of ways. The easiest is just to insert some faster segments of 1-3 minutes into your runs. Don't want to use a watch, run hard to the top of each hill. If you're in the flatland, stuff like 1 minute on, 1 minute off x 8-15 is a nice off season quality session. If you love running around the track, maybe do 800s at slightly faster than your threshold pace with an 800m recovery run at easy pace. For a 16 minute 5k guy, maybe the 800s are 2:35 ish. Give yourself until the watch gets to 7 minutes to start your next 800 (so, easy run the next 800 in 4:25 ish). Once again, you're getting some quality without running the engine too hot. If you do 5 reps, you'll have a 5 mile run in 35 minutes with 2.5 of it at around your 5k pace and the whole session won't be that hard.

The other thing you need to do is to improve your threshold. From your 800/1500 time, it seems like you're probably already pretty aerobically strong, so I'm guessing that tempo runs and threshold runs are something you have done quite a bit of. Once a week, do an out and back run where you run out easy for 20-30 minutes and then try to come back 10-15% faster. So, if you run out easy at 7:00 pace, for 30 minutes (about 4.25 miles), turn around and come back in 26-27 minutes (about 6 min per mile). Doing it this way is kind of mentally easier than saying, I'm going to run this 5 mile loop at x amount of time.

At least once a week you need to sprint (as in full go, full recovery reps). We do this on the day before our tempo efforts. It's an aerobically easy day for us. We'll run 30 ish minutes easy, then go through an extensive series of drills and easy build up sprints, then we'll do something like 3-4 x 60m full go with 4-5 min recovery OR 2-3 x 150 full go with 4-5 min recovery (the longer reps can sometimes interfere with your quality workout the next day, so don't do too many). We do weights on this day as well.

The other days of the week, fill it in with as much mileage as you can handle. If you were a 42 mpw guy, try going up to the high 40s, You're already doing pretty good, so don't feel like you need to go crazy with the mileage.

Maybe sprinkle in some strides after your hard runs and you're probably golden. A week for you might look something like this

M: 6 mile run with 10 x 1 on 1 off inserted, with the ons at 5:30 ish pace and the offs at your normal easy pace (don't run the ons so hard that you need to totally jog on the offs. Strides after

T: 7 miles easy

W: 4 miles + drills + sprints + weights

Th: 8 miles (4 easy, 4 fast) +strides

F: 5 easy + weights

S: 9 easy with occasional accelerations to around 1500-3000 race pace for 20 seconds during the last few miles

S: Off or easy 3 mile shake out

This would get you to your previous peak of 42. As you get fitter, you can add a mile here and a mile there and build toward the high 40s.

Do that for the next 4-6 ish weeks and then you can try moving on to tougher stuff.

As you get stronger: The reps should become FASTER and the tempo stuff should become LONGER. The good guys around here (8:5x through 9:1x for 3200) were going 7 miles tempo on the track at 5:30 pace last year

If you want to copy the best -> narve reveals how he/the ingebrigtsen’s train during the different periods of the year in episode 34 of the podcast ”conversations about running” aswell as in his interview from 28 june 2023 with the ”letsrun track talk” podcast.

Take the next 3-4 weeks super easy, only run a few days per week if you want to, and no "training" just run conversational pace with friends, or on a trail or something. use this time to do other things you like, basketball, rock climbing, whatever- be a normal HS kid for a few weeks. the break is as good for you mentally as physically.

after the break slowly start to work back to running 4-5 days per week, again, no "training" just easy running.

This is a great time of year to get stronger. Lots of drills, hit the weight room, you can find hundreds of lifting plans for runners on here. I find it easy to hit the gym in the Winter, it's dark early, it's cold and gross out, might as well be inside getting fit and doing something different.

Once the NY begins it's time to start adding in a tempo, hill sprints- keep the lifting and drills.

Feb- you are now starting to get into actual training for the track season. More race specific, cut back on the lifting, keep basic drills... on to the season.

Step 1 - Take two weeks completely off.

Step 2 - week 1 run 20mpw, add 5mpw or so each week until you get to 50mpw. This should take about six weeks. Then maintain a couple weeks before starting workouts. So phase 1 is about 8wks (~Dec/Jan)

Example 50ish mile week could be

Mon - 6-7mi easy, drills, hill sprints, weights

Tues- 9-10mi PRR

Wed - 6-7mi easy, drills, strides, weights

Thur- 9-10mi PRR

Friday- 6-7mi easy, drills, strides, weights

Sat- 10-12mi LR

Sun-off

Then start adding in workouts that most are stating above.

Thanks for the post, should I get straight into this or should I build up to this? I think I can take 30 miles this week, but I don't know if I should implement more fartlek and tempo style work yet. I was reading Lydiard's methods and it was saying how you don't really implement even easy tempos until later in the season after the base period, did I misunderstand?

Anyway, thanks for all the insight.

Is PRR a progression run?

I used to prescribe this type of pre season. However, I've been looking at some of the really good teams and see that they are doing more structured work during their pre-seasons. Lots of fartlek, tempos, and controlled pace intervals is what I'm seeing from the top HS programs these days.

So, I'm going to give it a shot with a little more structure to my pre-season this year and see how that goes.

Tempo is a crappy term because it means many things to many people.

Lydiard's guys did NOT just do easy mileage. He used the term Highest Steady State (HSS) to describe the effort level that his athletes did for many of their runs. HSS would be similar in effort to what many of us call tempo or maybe Sub Threshold efforts. He described it as going fast but staying comfortable. If you're using the 3 zone system that people like to talk about, it would be at the high end of zone 2.

What are the "drills" mentioned above? Specific speed / track drills? thanks.

Thanks, should I be doing HSS/sub threshold runs now? I'm thinking of doing a sub threshold run twice a week accompanied by easy days with hill sprints or strides, and a weekly longrun.

That's a fine plan. It's right along the lines of what Citius 5000 posted. Remember, sub-t/M-pace/HSS/long tempo (or whatever names are out there) work because they allow you to spend a lot of TIME at an intensity just below your actual lactate threshold. If you go too hard, the TIME you spend at that intensity drops off dramatically. If you don't go hard enough, you don't get the stimulus.

A 40-50 mpw guy should be able to do 6-7 miles sub t without too much trouble. If you can't go that far with out dying, you're going too fast. If you get to the end and it was really easy, you probably didn't go hard enough.

Better than 2 HSS runs would be 1 HSS run and one run closer to threshold or sets of threshold intervals. But, you're fine also with 2 HSS runs as long as you're doing sprints and strides.

We do the "atomic" speed workout a lot.

Here's a complete speed strength day. Word of caution, my kids were pretty flat the day after this one. I think they got a little excited because they knew I was filming AND we ran 150s on this day rather than our normal 50-60m sprints.

When should I start up higher intensity workouts? Also, I have a lifting class this semester, how should I fit that in with track season coming up? I want to be prepared in the 1500 3k and 800, and have been running 40-50 mile weeks for the past few weeks. I am doing longruns at 6:20 roughly for 12-15 miles, and feel good. Also, ran a 4xmile recently in 5:25, 5:19, 4:59, 4:40 with last one on track with spikes. felt really easy, could've gone for another mile. (Fast 3k soon)

Any advice helps

2 min rest, 10 min for the last one to get spikes on and all

Hi CoachB, for max speed days, should I cooldown a few miles afterwards or would that hurt the speed work gains?