edumacator wrote:
You need longer distance work and time to develop at longer distances. Also you need to stop racing your workouts so much. That 5x1500 would have done you way more good if you had run them in 5:20 instead of 5:00. As it was you basically did the workout at race intensity. You're leaving your best performances out on the track at practice. And look into doing some tempo runs or other types of overdistance work, especially if you want to eventually do well at 1500 and above.
This is one of the best pieces of advice on here.
This year in cross, I had a couple of kids who were fairly talented but young (girl in 2nd year of cross, boy in first). Both wanted to always work harder/train more/run intervals and tempo faster. I had to put strict speed limits on them for our interval workouts so that they would not leave their best races in training.
Both progressed steadily through the season with the girl ending up 5th at the CA state meet (in our division) and the boy (a freshman) qualifying for state and ending up as the #13 frosh for all divisions combined.
Our key was that the workouts were never too hard and our easy days were never too easy. I tried to teach the runners that each day has its purpose and that if they could achieve their purpose running at a certain pace, then it was a waste of energy running the workout at a faster pace.
For instance, if we were trying to work on being mechanically smooth, we would run at about mile race pace and we would take plenty of rest. If the goal is mechanical smoothness, you don't want to go into your repeats tired. so, if we were doing 400s (and we might only have done 3-4 in a workout) we would take a good 2-3 min between them. We would usually do a 4-5 mile progression (progressing to steady state pace) run prior to this.
If our goal was to improve lactate threshold (the pace at which you can still run comfortably) we did the workouts at the minimum pace needed to work that system. The athletes were never allowed to go too hard on those workouts. We often did our threshold workout in the form of intervals with very short recoveries (5 x 1200 @ tempo pace with 1 min recovery). If you look at our workout times, they are not that impressive, but the kids always raced well. My freshman boy ran a 17:02 about 2/3 of the way throuh the season, but had almost never run that pace in a workout. The "hardest" interval session he did this year was 3 x 1k @ 3:20-3:25 (16:40 to 17:05 pace) with 6 min recovery. For our tempo interval 1200s, my boy almost never went faster than 4:27-4:28 (5:55 pace) even though he could do 4 mile tempo runs at the same pace without stopping.
So, if my athletes never worked "hard" in training, how did they continue to improve so steadily in races? The answer is a steady application of moderate intensity workouts, but the intensity of the workout was tightly controlled so that the athletes would be able to come back the next day and still do good training.
I had a different girl last year in track who came into the season with an 800 PR of 2:37 from the previous season. She had a good steady pre season build up last year and opened up her outdoor season in early march with a PR effort 2:35. Often when kids open up the season with a PR, they don't progress much during the season or go backward. This girl steadily progressed and ran PRs in every big race of the season (discounting league dual meets where she often had to do 4 events) and ended up running 2:26 at our league championship meet. I don't have her specific workouts here at home, but I will look up what she was doing last winter and post it later. It was similar in philosophy to what I've posted about my cross country runners this season, but more geared toward being smooth and efficient at 400-1600 race paces.