Speed work Day before Race

Interesting. My first thought is that flying 30s arent all that different from strides so maybe it’s just your runners getting into form. Then again maybe flying 30s are somehow better than strides.

Webb used to do 120/100/80 (I think?) twice (again I think) a week. Before his tuesday workout and his race (???) its on the webb 2009 article. He did these hard.

Anyways yes I would not be surprised by a positive effect of flying 30's but it depends on the intensity and volume of them, along with where you are in the season. If the runners are running ~600 pace or slower, they won't be very neurologically stressfull, while being short enough where the runner should recover quite easily. There is also no build up of lactic acid which stresses the body out even if just slightly. If they are faster, 400 or faster, I would not be surprised again if their was a positive effect, but max v or something close to max v is very stressfull, and I would not recomend when athletes are peaking. Again for volume, I wouldn't do more than 2 or 3 by the midpoint of the season, but now, when you have done little speedwork, the gains of the max v on their economy will be very great, so along with the smaller stress load (early season) it should be beneficial.

You seem intelligent enough to make sure your runners are getting a good warmup, but if they are not it can definitely harm performance.

That’s interesting about Webb. I’ll see if I can find the article. I think people do their flying 30’s somewhat differently: I do 6 x flying 30, with a 30m acceleration zone and a 30m fly zone (where they hold top speed). I give 3-4 minutes rest between reps. I don’t consider it a heavy workout, but I’ve always understood it to be taxing on the CNS, and I know it can hit speed based athletes a lot harder. That’s the only thing I can think of here is that I wouldn’t consider any of these guys “speedy” and those types of guys don’t seem to be hit very hard by the workout. I appreciate the feedback.

Well, in cycling I'd never go on the training rhythm of hard-soft-hard-soft. It's always struck me as odd in the running world. Consider me a big proponent of a small, focused and fast workout the day before a race. I gauge that there's a more consistent race performance the day after "kicking the engines on", versus coming out of easy mode, trying to light the fires.

Think you're on it with causation/correlation. You could've had them all run an ez hour & the results might have been the same. It's about all of the training that led up to that race. The flying 30s feel close enough to strides. If the kids are bought into them & it gives them confidence then maybe you want to do them before other meets (maybe a smaller # of them)

Typical pre meet for us is a couple of miles of easy jogging, then 1-2 x300m @ 1600m pace, then 2-3 flying 150s

I think doing something a bit more "serious" helps mentally to get into "race mode" and I think sparking up the system a bit the day before but without big fatigue is better than jogging around.

I dont have any science behind this, it's just my own experience.

You're 'activating' the muscles/muscle fibres. I PR'd in the marathon a day after racing a 10k. Every time I work out in the gym the day before a race (heavy squats etc), I always perform well.

This is why most people take the day off 2 days before the race, and then run the day before, but most people don't run that hard, they just jog. Okay to loosen things up I guess but I believe you need to run hard/fast, just don't overdo the distance, and perhaps work in some rest periods so it's more like a fartlek or interval workout, just with fewer reps than usual.

Similar thing to immediately before the race when you want to do some 100-200m strides 15, 20, 30 minutes or whatever before.

Could be an outlier. I always trained through early season meets with my high school athletes. Very easy for high school kids to still PR. I wouldn’t stress the CNS like that before meets your peaking for.

You'll never know if they would have performed even better had they not done this.

I have experimented a bit with having kids do a little speed work on the day of a race. Like, 2-3x 400m at close to race pace 90 minutes before a 3000m and 5000m. The kids report back to me that they feel a lot smoother early in the race when we do this.

In the 80s and 90s one of the best mountain racers was an Irishman called John Lenihan. He wasn't a world beater on the roads and track like he was on mountains but he had a half marathon best of 1:03 something and was a legitimate contender for Ireland's '84 Olympic team at 5,000 meters. I read an interview with him long ago, have no idea where anymore, but he said he did a session of 400s, either four or six of them, the day before a race and found that he raced better when he did that than when he didn't. For what it's worth.