rojo wrote:
As a college coach, I read your post and just started laughing. I mean you remind of the small segment of highschool runners who come up to me looking for the "secret". There is no "secret." Changing your freaking form or doing some stupid drill isn't going to take you from 14:00 to 12:55 in the 5k. Stuff like that has it's place and can help but please.....
Get out and run!!!
Can you please tell me what coaches do the method you are talking about?
JK actually used to yell at us for listening to music on the way to meets that was bad for our heartrate but we certainly didn't waste 40 minutes a day worrying about getting our britanny spears mp3 to beat to our stride frequence. insteady we ran for 40 minutes.
First of all, as a U.S. college coach you are very clueless as far as what it takes to go from 14:00 to 12:55 in the 5K. Second of all, there are no U.S. coaches who can say different either. So your comment of just "get out and run!!!" hasn't worked for anyone in the U.S. and the fact that you laughed at it just shows how far away you are from every understanding of how to get runners to a competitive world-class level.
Have you ever had your athletes do a track workout where you gave splits at the 400m mark? Do you ever give your athlete goal times? Do you tell them to fartlek their way to get their pace or do they simply pace the whole way? Well I would bet that most athletes pace their workouts and get splits. Training to keep your stride frequency to a certain beat or cadence is simply an advanced way of training. It is also the most efficient and practical way to get your body to adapt and adjust to a faster pace.
Have you ever watched a world-class swim meet? You ever hear horn blowing in the stands? They are blowing the horn to a specific cadence that the swimmer is trying to keep in order to break a world-record. Swimmers are already using the philosophy in their training. Like you said, Americans just "run". And that's exactly all they can say after they've run in a world-class meet.
But it's a lot better to train to music that is mixed to the correct pace then to just listen to a bunch of beeps. It's not childish, it's simply advanced, far more advanced then your track program, and far more advance than any training out on the farm or in the hanson's program, etc.
I've put up a lot of good ideas but I really think you guys are too far behind to really grasp these advanced level concepts in training philosophy.
It's going to take a lot more than just being a moderator of a U.S. based website to put up any reasonable challenge to my advanced level training concepts.