Are there any examples of teams who race through cross country without doing more interval training. I am curious as to how a team would do if they just did broken tempo runs/fartlek workouts and hill repeats of various lengths and intensities combined with racing as the only hard days. Would this be more beneficial to long term development to take the fall season as an extended base period and then do more interval based training in track while they focus on shorter races such as the mile.
Look up his other articles on this site. He had a good bit of success with training that sounds somewhat like what you're talking about.
When I was in highschool, we didn't do work outs in cross country. I can only think of about 5 workouts that we did through my whole highschool cross career. we generally just went for a run everyday of about 5-8 miles. some days we would run faster, some days slower, but it was never planned. A lot of times we raced the last mile or two of our runs. I thought this was great training, and I had steady improvement under this model.
I find it hard to believe that anyone would take this stuff seriously. Looking at the warm up alone should be enough to scare you away from this crap. Static stretching for 20 minutes? Hello, the 1950's called and they want their workout back.
New Coach wrote:
Are there any examples of teams who race through cross country without doing more interval training. I am curious as to how a team would do if they just did broken tempo runs/fartlek workouts and hill repeats of various lengths and intensities combined with racing as the only hard days. Would this be more beneficial to long term development to take the fall season as an extended base period and then do more interval based training in track while they focus on shorter races such as the mile.
Don't the Kenyans typically do way more tempo-style workouts than westerners? I read somewhere that their bread and butter workout is an hour or so, starting slow and getting faster each mile. Over big hills at altitude, of course.
But those guys aren't training for the mile...
As a slow-footed guy, guys like me would benefit from some high speed stuff in xc season - like 20 x 200 or regular canova hills.
The main problem is that when things get down to it in xc, you need to handle the suffering - you haev to teach them in workouts how to handle that.
I don't like the idea of saying you're "deemphasizing" the season but I've had a lot of success spurning traditional intervals and racing off of tempos and strides. Farrell was a local coach when I went to high school and I loved talking to him and his athletes about his training when he was just coming up with the idea. he was a pretty big influence on me. I've had kids run amazing off of almost an entire season without traditional intervals and then a few weeks of tune ups at the end of the season.
sisyphus wrote:
I don't like the idea of saying you're "deemphasizing" the season but I've had a lot of success spurning traditional intervals and racing off of tempos and strides. Farrell was a local coach when I went to high school and I loved talking to him and his athletes about his training when he was just coming up with the idea. he was a pretty big influence on me. I've had kids run amazing off of almost an entire season without traditional intervals and then a few weeks of tune ups at the end of the season.
Is this the sisyphus as in HS coach of Donn Cabral? Did Cabral train this way during XC?
@ layman,
Believe it or not Cabral trained much of his track career like this. To be clear, I was not the xc coach at Glastonbury, just track. However, Donn's junior and senior years, the training looked a lot like I wanted it to. Before the 15:09/10 at VCP there were only two track/interval workouts in November and maybe another two in October (depending on how you quantify fartlek). The previous year during indoor we had great results with the entire team off of no intervals, then I put the intervals in before nationals and we seemed to get slower. Whoops!
I think this is suspect too. He mentions no intervals yet he has people going "all out" for 110 meters on the track, and he says he's using a workout from Runner's World? I'd like to see how fast some of his guys run.
The fact also that he talks about doing workouts "on the road" scares me. Getting someone to run fast in Cross Country is much easier than getting them to run fast times on the track. Tempo running once a week, long run once a week, strides 2 times a week, long intervals at race pace once a week...it's pretty simple. Just don't flog your people and be patient and build their mileage and effort over 4 years and that's all you can do, the rest is talent. The more of the work you do on the grass the better.
info wrote:
I think this is suspect too. He mentions no intervals yet he has people going "all out" for 110 meters on the track, and he says he's using a workout from Runner's World? I'd like to see how fast some of his guys run.
The fact also that he talks about doing workouts "on the road" scares me. Getting someone to run fast in Cross Country is much easier than getting them to run fast times on the track. Tempo running once a week, long run once a week, strides 2 times a week, long intervals at race pace once a week...it's pretty simple. Just don't flog your people and be patient and build their mileage and effort over 4 years and that's all you can do, the rest is talent. The more of the work you do on the grass the better.
Well, Farrell coached the national record holder for 3200 (girls) to 9:48. Had a few guys close to 9 flat if I recall correctly.
I think you have to limit hard XC workouts and treat it as more of a base period without hard intervals. If you hammered all XC, hammered all indoor, and hammered all outdoor, you're going to burn out. At least I think some people do. You need to run fast, and you need to do speed work (200s at race pace). But to do a lot of anaerobic work XC sounds like over training. Now if you aren't doing indoor then you can do a winter base, and go hard for XC
Seems like an unnecessarily huge amount of base work to be doing. You already have a few months in the summer and another few months in the winter for base training. If you focus on base training in the fall as well, your base training is stretching from the beginning of June through the start of track season. Seems excessive to me.
Perhaps what coaches should be deemphasizing is winning and focus more on the long term development of the runner.
Every middle school coach pushes kids to win the metro meet. Then HS coaches push for a city title then sectional then state championships a few days later. College coaches now limit races in order to make a run at the NCAA's so it's train, train, train. Add indoor and outdoor to this mindset and the US has a bunch of kids that have not developed to their max.
Don't get me wrong...I'm all in favor of hoisting a throphy and hanging a banner. But if we brought kids around with a bigger base, then adding workouts as they age, perhaps better performance...as a whole...across the country would be had.
Which brings me to question:
What events occured waqy back when that placed athlete development under the watch care of the education system? The US needs a better club system.
...and perhaps the US needs a better education system based on some of my fast fingered spelling above. Oh well.
I guess "de-emphasizing" was probably not the best way for me to phrase what I want to do. I've just noticed that a lot of high school programs run their kids too hard, and it might benefit the kids to focus more on aerobic development during xc and speed during track. Not to say that speed is totally ignored during xc or that aerobics are ignored during track but the emphasis shifts. I think people can run fast and be very competitive on fewer workouts and than they think necessary.
New Coach wrote:
I guess "de-emphasizing" was probably not the best way for me to phrase what I want to do. I've just noticed that a lot of high school programs run their kids too hard, and it might benefit the kids to focus more on aerobic development during xc and speed during track. Not to say that speed is totally ignored during xc or that aerobics are ignored during track but the emphasis shifts. I think people can run fast and be very competitive on fewer workouts and than they think necessary.
... or more workouts with less intensity per workout.
...or more aerobic development over the summer so the kids can handle it. Then fewer high intensity workout so the kids don't learn to hate intervals. Then plenty of races so the kids learn how to race.
I hope this thread hangs around and we hear some anecdotal evidence.
I havent seen anyone take their team in this direction first hand, but I would love to see the results over a few seasons. I think it is a great idea. If you are taking HS kids with little aerobic foundation and doing 2 workouts a week + racing... probably too much. But its hard to be patient when you are coaching. If you "just run" 4-5 days a week (with 1 workout and maybe a race) you feel like you arent doing enough.
Someone mentioned earlier that they thought that maybe this was too much of a base period. There is no such thing as too much of a base period, everything in HS should be part of building a base.
As a coach in the Northeast where we compete for three seasons, xc, indoor, outdoor, I have always used the approach that the fall is used to build a stronger base. this means no speed or anaerobic training, all tempo, hills, and some threshold stuff. Then in the winter, continue hills, threshold and the races are used as the anaerobic stuff, still no anaerobic training. There is no way to train like a nut for three seasons and have them be three successful seasons.