I think it's a good idea to track mileage, for those coaches that have kids track their mileage, how do you o about it?
I think it's a good idea to track mileage, for those coaches that have kids track their mileage, how do you o about it?
Have them them report their mileage to you in whatever form they feel like reporting it. That is what my coach did; however, he only had us report our weekend mileage or summer mileage to him. He showed us some of his old records. I found it interesting that one guy I ran with who went on to be pretty good recorded all of his mileage in minutes ever since he was a freshman. The kid wasn't a runner before HS either; he was a basketball player.
Use the website Runningahead.com and form a group. It's the best log website that's out.
Ya RunningAHEAD works great and I know more collegiate programs are starting to use it for summer training logs.
My coach used to just have us tell him what our total summer mileage was at the first practice. Of course, some kids straight lied to his face, but it became very obvious very soon who those kids were.
My son's hs coach tries to get the guys to track mileage but most don't. He gives them all a homemade grid and prefills in the dates, in weekly blocks, on the left hand side. The coach has measured out a bunch of courses, so they all pretty much know the distances for most places they would run around town. Most of these kids aren't serious runners and I think only my son and one other kid regularly keep the charts.
My son is really into running and will run in college, and he has logged his miles religiously since freshman year. Last year, his jr year, I got him a gps and he uses it a lot. Also the coach last year gave him a real runners diary, and encouraged him to not only log miles but to write descriptions such as route, type of run or workout, and anything else. He was really reluctant at first but after the coach pulled out his own logs from high school days, he converted my son. And my son is really happy he started writing that stuff down, since the coach is moving and it's not clear what quality coach they'll get. With his log and his old coach's help, he can pretty much coach himself this year if he has to.
Back in HS we had printed out booklets for running logs and we were required to turn them in--if we didn't we weren't allowed to race! They were only checked one or twice a season, so what it ended up being was most of the guys on the team coming over to my house and copying from my log (in which I had actually recorded all of the workouts) into their empty ones!