Workouts with two meets a week

It’s unreasonable to expect athletes to race all out twice a week and stay healthy and competitive at the end of the season.

Depending on how good your runner / team is you can treat some meets as workout days by racing controlled and adding post-race workouts (e.g, 3200m race tempo + 1k/mile LT reps or fartlek).

If you’re racing athletes all out twice a week, then definitely keep the rest of the week relatively light - HS athletes have high improvement curves and the job of a coach should mostly be don’t mess it up. Maybe some tempo/LT reps one day and some strides at most.

Agree with this. Try to keep the obvious meets more like tempo efforts than all our races, if you can do that and still win. Get your runners to understand which meets are important and which ones are easy.

Agree that the schedule isn't ideal, but for the lower level athletes who aren't great at pushing the limits anyways I think it's good enough as a training stimulus. The tricky part is the more experienced athletes who have no problem pushing hard solo. It's just hard to provide the required attention to manage athletes racing and athletes working out at the same time, not to mention that the track obviously isn't available for workouts. Any thoughts on racing athletes in off events for the meets that don't really matter to provide a different stimulus? Dropping a 3200m runner down to the 800 for example.

What part of the country are you in? What is the attitude of getting athletes to practice? What is the level of competition? These are very important questions to answer before you take any advice.

This is all you need to know. ^

2 meets/week every week isn't it. Just going to burn them out/get them injury, especially if you're trying to add quality on top of that. Not even sure how the spacing works with another workout & a long run. Plus it's winter -- where's the base for outdoors when everyone is racing on this kind of a schedule? The most logical thing to me is to treat the mid-week race as a workout day. The races are done as a workout/add light tempo stuff after the race for runners who can handle it. Then you can at least have some easy mileage days mixed into training.

This will be my first outdoor season as a coach but I did help the distance kids last year and coached cross country. Our bigger invitationals are on the weekend. Saving the better athletes for those meets would give the newer athletes chances to race. Our older athletes seemed to be pretty good at managing their race schedules and could be trusted to go off and do a workout on their own. Our team goals come first so we pick and choose which meets to focus on. Good luck!

-explain which races are important and which are not.

-run them in off distances, dont make them do the same thing every meet.

-don't race your entire team at every meet

I know as a coach it's easy to talk about how a meet doesnt matter, but I remember when I was in HS if we had a meet and I was spiking up, wearing the uni and the gun went off, I was racing!

Rather than considering advice for managing the problem you inquired about, consider eliminating it.

Do you have good help? If so, look at the weeks forecast, choose one meet and plan your workouts accordingly. The problem isnt having 2 meets on the schedule. The problem is you feel you have to take the kids to every meet. A trustworthy adult can stay back and admin the workout or take the other kids to the meet while you stay back if the workout is one that requires strict attention. If you are a small program, this might be a little more challenging but taking kids to meets that are not important enough to race is wasting a good workout that would be more productive. This includes intangibles such as sitting outside all night on a school night or missing class and keeping a regular routine.

In the future, eliminate unnecessary meets from the schedule, take your chances with the weather and focus on a consistent training cycle that sets kids up for success.

Where you are at now, you might have to consider running the kids in different races from their main events early season to protect them. Example, cold crappy weather, sprinters go long and distance goes short. Then the opposite on warmer days. If you had an i door season, then kids already had a chance to start working on their main events to some degree. Usually mid April is when you have to start putting things together anyway.

High school track and field is a team oriented sport, and the school should expect an attempt at league titles etc for their investment, which is something that the community can take great pride in.

Obviously, this should never get in the way of the development of a real talent. fortunately, this is not a problem, because real talent can tempo their way through league meets. We can all over analyze our workout programs to death, but a good coach can always give his 4:20 miler or whatever a great workout with any mix of 4 events from a standard league meet.

The lesser kids typically only race once per week, because they aren't good enough for the weekend invites.

Those medium kids are the ones who get worked. Many of them over worked. These are the kids you need to find the right balance for. Maybe they are only doing one or two races instead of 3 or 4. If planned intelligently, it can be done very well and safely.

As far as workouts between meets, you can do max speed development on days before those league meets. Again, be careful with those middle kids. They can handle some of this, but maybe not what the really talented kids can. Light tempo workout, like threshold 400s can be squeezed on a thursday between a Tuesday/Saturday schedule, or a Sunday between Friday/Tuesday schedule. just use your best judgement. sometimes this is completely unnecessary.

Most people are really only going to have a heavy racing schedule for 6 or 7 weeks. it can be managed. you need to put in the real work during the weeks leading up to this part of the season.

Bottom line, most kids can handle some version of a two meets per week racing shedule. Don't abuse them. Read signs and make sure you are doing the right thing and not getting too greedy with points.

But also realize that for some kids, grinding out points and winning league championships as a part of a team is going to be the pinnacle of their running life, and produce some of the fondest memories from their high school days.

Lots of good responses here.

1. If you have kids that are good and can win easily, one of the meets can be a training day. Run them in a bunch of off events. Got a good miler? Run him in the 4,8, and 4x4 then have him do a long cool down, easy tempo, tempo intervals, or some sort of supplementary session after the meet.

2. If you have kids that aren't going to win going 85%, (like most of us). Then either limit them to one event per meet OR have them take off the occasional meet.

3. Recognize that some of the best training for racing is actual racing. With very underdeveloped kids, you can race them more frequently because they just don't know how to go all the way to the well during races and won't really burn themselves out. You can comb through athletic.net and find freshmen who run 10-15 PR's per season just because they're running easy mileage and lots of races.

3a. If you're going with option 3, keep the volume relatively high, since you're going to be treating early season meets as workouts with your newbs.

4. If you fell the need to add in another quality session, especially to further the kid's aerobic development, Go with some sort of tempo, CV interval, cruise interval session that isn't that hard.

I had a 2 miler 10 years ago. He holds our school record to this day. In hind sight, I probably had him do too much hard stuff his senior year, after setting the record as a Junior. If I had to do it over again, an average week might have looked like this. (he went up to 80 MPW in the off season and was 50-60 during the competitive season)

M: 1-2 WU : Drills + 5 ish miles tempo effort + strides + short CD and Stretch/Roll

T: Sprint drill warm up + 8-10 easy

W: Dual meet day. 2 mile WU + drills + strides + 1600m @ 3200 pace FTW + 1 mile CD + 800 HARD + 3-4 cool down

Th: Warm up sprint drills + 8-10 easy

F: 4-5 easy + 4 x 200 @ 1 mile GP with full recovery + 800 CD + roll + stretch

S: Invitational 3200 + long cool down (8 ish total miles for the day.)

Sun: Easy as needed for weekly volume or Off or Cross Train if the upcoming week was another 2 meet week.

THIS^

When I first got to Hughson, I'd come from a year assisting at the local D2 and before that I was at a high school program where we couldn't win dual meets and I was free to do what I wanted with my fast kids.

My first dual meet at Hughson, I didn't even try to win......you know, doing "what's best for the kids". I almost had a full on revolt. The kids on the team really wanted to win dual meets against league rivals. Long story short, is that I was still able to take 2 kids to USA U20 that summer (one was a disc guy, so I can't take credit for that one) and be competitive in dual meets.

I've had far more kids on my team who would rather grind out 3rd places to help the team win on a Wednesday than be super fresh and take 15th place to PR in an invitational.

It's a balancing act, to be sure.

CoachB is on the right track I think. If you can’t reduce meets i would basically do what he is suggesting. Even with having one meet a week I still would rotate events each week. A 2miler would only run that event every other week during the regular. Usually the mile and 800 the other week.

Geez, doing 2 workouts a week and a race on weekends is too much for the winter season, guess you aren't expecting much in the spring,

Too late to fix, but winter should be treated like and extension of XC for distance runners, the only difference is shorter races. Keep building strength in training and use the meets as speed development and learning how to race.

and if you are gonna race twice a week, no need to do a workout on top of that. Keep a long run in the there and allow for some recovery. You can also use meets as workouts or just skip one.

I remember suffering through cross country as a high school freshman, my first season of dedicated running. I can still remember the long run where I truly realized I was making progress - I had run farther than I previously did in the same amount of time. That moment helped spark my love for distance running.

so yeah, I’m an advocate for retaining the long run.

Aren't most cross programs doing 2 workouts and a race per week?

I am addressing this same problem as well. I am a first year coach. I was head coach for cross country. Program previously ran 13-15 meets in a season and I cut that down to 9. We had much improved success and had a great peak at our conference and regionals meets as desired.

Now moving to track, I am an assistant coach, coaching the distance group. Once we return from Spring Break we have 4 straight weeks of Tuesday league meet and Friday invitational. Throughout the season we 11 meets in the lead up to our conference and regionals meet, with another random Monday invite in between our conference and regionals, which are already only separated by 6 days.

Our head coaches are very much, "run as many events as possible and do whatever we need for the team score at EVERY single meet." I don't love the two meets in a week, but I can live with it if I can keep my athletes to 1 or 2 races per meet. But I cannot live with overracing our athletes. We are a high school of enrollment about 500, so not overly large teams (about 30-40 per gender), meaning I only have 6-8 mid-distance/long distance runner per gender.

I am sternly pushing for limited racing for the sake of development of our athletes, but am already being overruled and discounted in our first meet, which doesn't even keep a team score.

My thoughts are once we are in the full swing of two meets a week to have the week bread down something like this:

- Monday: Aerobic run + Strides + Lift/Plyos/Core

- Tuesday: Meet day, league meets meaning that athletes will likely be running multiple events)

- Wednesday: Medium long run OR brief threshold work

- Thursday: Aerobic run + Strides + Lift/Plyos/Core

- Friday: Meet day, invites/relay meets, may be able to do some post-race workouts here

- Saturday: Long run/Medium long run (has to be voluntary due to state rules)

- Sunday: Off.

Let me know your guys thoughts and what you would recommend. We have organized lifts at the beginning of practice on Mondays and Thursdays, run by our strength and conditioning coach for the school, he does do a good job of gauging how to push the athletes depending on their upcoming schedules and events.

Light amount of threshold 1ks and some 150s or 200s at mile pace