free willy wrote:
As an earlier poster stated (luv2run?), this is symptomatic of the problems when school coaching predominates over club coaching. What coach in their right mind assigns training based on a group dynamic. Everyone is an individual and should be treated as such, or please don't coach, you aren't competent enough.
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Do you coach high school kids? Group dynamic is everything when it comes to developing a team (at least in my area). It is the reason that the majority of kids want to run hard. I've been coaching for 16 years now and from what I've seen, very, very few athletes will actually go out and do all of their training on their own.
When I was a new coach, I thought that all runners would be motivated like I was. I would talk to them about how to do their weekend runs...at their own pace...listening to their bodies. Monday would come around and I'd ask the kids how their runs went and they were like, "we were supposed to run?" I would have a bunch of different track workouts going on at the same time for small groups of distance kids...That worked out well for perciecely one girl (who ended up getting bronze at USA Juniors). Most kids would end up saying something to the effect of, "I wish I was that other person, she only has to run 400s. I hate 1000s".
Group dynamic is everything. Kids will work harder and acutally seem to enjoy the shared suffering if the suffering is actually SHARED.
Our program has been simplified lately. More progression runs and tempo intervals. Workouts levels are still based on experience and ability, but there is a much smaller range to the types of workouts going on. As a result of this, we are seeing much better results.