Did these midseason workouts cause a late season burnout?

bump, were those typical workouts for highschoolers? I only knew one kind of work out back then, which was 400-800m reps with 2-3:30 min recovery. I think we did longer repeats of 1000m 1200m once each.

I've found that it's never one specific workout that leads to burn out. Also, sometimes it's the lack of certain workouts that lead to decreases in performance rather than the presence of a particular workout. For example, leading up to the first time you did these workouts were you doing more mileage or more tempo running? If you were, perhaps you dropped your mileage too low or did too little tempo and over the season your strength declined. This happened to me earlier this spring. Leading up to my national championships I was feeling really good on my fast workouts but anything 800m or over felt terrible (my mileage and tempo work had dropped as a result of allergies and I just wasn't feeling strong). It was late in the season, but my allergy problem had been pretty well sorted out so I decided to re-touch on my tempo runs (5 x 2000m with 2min recovery, 3x15min with 2min recovery, and 40min progression runs were a few of the longer workouts I performed) for the few weeks prior to the big race. The week before I started on the tempo work I ran 14:34 for 5000. At nationals 3 weeks later I ran 13:56. I feel confident that re-touching on threshold work was a major reason for this improvement. Ideally, I would have tried to maintain the balance throughout the spring but, having lost this balance, I think I did the best I could under the circumstances. For the future, my advice is that you need to look back at what allowed you to do the workouts in the first place. If you're forcing the effort and running slower than you were runnng in previous weeks it is possible that you're tired and need to back off a bit (on the intensity or the volume), but it's also possible that you need to add some kind of training back in. One last thing: I do workouts like you're describing year round and think that if you're able to do them from a point of strength (I.e. you run them hard but feel like you can always do a few more at the end if you really need to) they are a good part of a balanced program for middle distance runners. Good luck.

JZ

The short answer to your question is yes. Especially if you are a runner who can build a lot of lactate (as opposed to a "strength" runner who is better the longer the distance).

Your coach should never have had you do such hard workout every week, and he should have made sure and balance them with a huge amount of easy running.

You do not need much work at this intensity. As you yourself note, after a coupla weeks you felt great and ran a 30 sec PR. But then you continued with the high intense workouts and just ruined your good condition so much you ran poorer for the rest of the season.

Keep the easy runs easy, as they "protect" your good aerobic endurance. Easy runs should be somewhere around 2:00 mins to 2:20mins PER MILE slower than your 5k PR pace. If it feels too easy, just go further.

The All-Time Loser wrote:

Your coach should never have had you do such hard workout every week, and he should have made sure and balance them with a huge amount of easy running.

I hate posts like these from holier-than-thou know-it-alls. You have no idea about the coach's overall plan and therefore should keep quiet.

u don't know jack wrote:

I hate posts like these from holier-than-thou know-it-alls. You have no idea about the coach's overall plan and therefore should keep quiet.

But it sounds as if the coach's plan was unkown to the initial poster and that the plan didn't work. The runner crashed and burned. He's looking for reasons why.

Coaches always make mistakes. The difference between a good coach and a bad coach, is that a good coach sees the mistake and changes his methods. A bad coach just blames the athletes and carries on the same.

An athlete has to do much the same. If he makes training mistakes, he needs to see what they were and needs to take action so that they don't occur repeatedly.

When the "coach's overall plan" leads to circumstances as decribed by the runner who started this thread, it is obvious that there was NO "overall plan" and the coach did not know what he was doing.

Do you think he WANTED to burn out his kids? Do you think his "overall plan" was to get them to run slower?

It's not me that has "no idea". It's this runner's coach. He thought it was all about intensity and toughness, and "eyeball's out" sessions...

And so that this runner does not hear crap from the coach about how the training was perfectly planned but the runners let him (the coach) down. About how they did not have "the balls" for the training. Or "gut it out" and "suck it up" and other such drivel spouted by all coaches who do not know what they are doing, I replied to this runner just to reassure him that the training (as described) was flawed. That the sessions he was given led to him running worse and worse as the season progressed.

So take your own advice and butt out!

Thanks for the responses. To add more history, we slowly built up over the summer with 45 -55minute runs around 6:30 pace i believe at around 5'000 ft. Recovery days would have been more like 30-40 at around 7:15ish. Probably worked up to 45 miles a week haven't really done the math and don't remember. Come the season our regular runs shortened and we slowed down to probably 7:00 to 7:45 pace. We added morning runs and intense speed workouts of 600 -800m repeats. After a month and half of these or so I felt as if I had been shot in the legs. Nothing under me at all.

I'm wondering did this feeling correspond to not being able to maintain a anaerobic peak for more than 2 or 3 weeks? Thus it would have been like 3 weeks for the workouts to kick in / pay off and then 2 or 3 more of decent running followed by very heavy feeling for the next month or so.

Would longer repeats at slower than race paces with shorter breaks had been better at this point. Also what are your opinions on short say 200-400m efforts at faster than race pace say, 20 seconds possibly, with longer breaks. Would those serve as a tune up to improve efficieny and create a more natural feeling while racing at faster paces without draining the legs too much in the long run?