I'm an assistant CC coach and had a discussion with the head coaches on the busride home today about how many CC races is a "good" amount for a high school kid. The reason this was brought up is because we have two races EVERY WEEK until the championship meets, giving us a total of 16 or 17 races. I think this is WAY too many, but the head coaches were saying that two races a week (Monday and Saturday on most weeks) is just fine.
What are your thoughts?
Tell him that Haile Gebrselassie (if he knows who that is) didn't race that much at the height of track career. And was running 120mi/wk and had been running for over 20yrs at that point.
I think 5 +/- a few is a good number prior to your league or conference championship. Much more than that is a lot of athletes with minimal background.
It's normal to have HS teams run 2 meets a week. Ours were Sat. and Tuesday and sometimes even on Thursday.
I don't hink most HS kids would be too hot about CC if you only did 7 or 8 races a year. Im not talking about the top top level athletes, but the majority of hs kids that are running would lose interest quickly if 95% of CC was just training runs, with an occational race.
It's up to the coach to make sure that top level runners aren't burn out by racing too much.
This year mine have run this:
Aug 26: 2 mile dual meet
Sept 20: Small invitational
Sept 27: Huge invitational
Oct 10: Huge invitational
Oct 16: JV meet
Oct 22: Region
Nov 1: State
Nov 29: NXN qualifier
JV runners got about 5 races.
Varsity get 6-7 races.
They're still excited about running and racing. The key has been to make it as fun as possible so that it's not just about training.
This is the 5th year I've done it this way.
my school is broke so we only have one race a week. except for when we went to the place that the region meet will be at..so far we had 6 races becuase one got stormed out..i like it like this so i can get my miles in