Other than breaking up people in to long distance and shorter stuff, does your coach break you up into many smaller groups in workouts or do you pack run? What do the top XC teams do?
Other than breaking up people in to long distance and shorter stuff, does your coach break you up into many smaller groups in workouts or do you pack run? What do the top XC teams do?
At my school, everyone trains for 10k. But not everyone runs the same mileage. Some do 80ish a week. Others are around 140 for a while. I can't think of even one week that 2 people on the team had the exact same mileage.
We do workouts together. We will split up duirng the course of the workout sometimes.
We only have 8 people on our team.
Yep. We always had a few groups with different goal paces for workouts.
consistently successful D3:
We have 3 general groups regardless of event that dictates the # and type of "hard" workouts. That's primarilly based on how we've responded to training in the past. Those who improve greatly by tapering mileage and increasing intensity of hard workouts will do more VO2 max focused sessions, whereas those who have trouble peaking will maintain longer hard runs and focus on lactate threshold.
D1 Runner wrote:
Other than breaking up people in to long distance and shorter stuff, does your coach break you up into many smaller groups in workouts or do you pack run? What do the top XC teams do?
What??? You mean proper coaching??? That's rather idealistic isn't it?
J.O. wrote:
D1 Runner wrote:Other than breaking up people in to long distance and shorter stuff, does your coach break you up into many smaller groups in workouts or do you pack run? What do the top XC teams do?
What??? You mean proper coaching??? That's rather idealistic isn't it?
My coach(D-I) did not have individual training for everyone. In Cross he had a "miler group" and they might only get in 8k of quality on an long interval day, and he had the "long distance" group who almost always did 10k of hard volume intervals. The "milers" did 70-80ish, and the longer group were all at or above 90mpw. During track the groups were the same, 800/1500 group & St/5000m/10000m group, the workouts were different most of the time for those two groups. I guess from what J.O. wrote it wasn't "proper", however, I do have 11 national championship rings in my safe at home. I wonder how my coach was able to pull that off without knowing how to "properly coach." Oh well, just dumb luck I guess. Probably coaching me to 6 All Americans and my roommate to 7 All Americans was just dumb luck as well. I don't know how we managed back then without all the "proper coaching" that goes on now days. I might figure it out one day if I ever get as smart as J.O.
Former D-I Runner wrote:
My coach(D-I) did not have individual training for everyone. In Cross he had a "miler group" and they might only get in 8k of quality on an long interval day, and he had the "long distance" group who almost always did 10k of hard volume intervals. The "milers" did 70-80ish, and the longer group were all at or above 90mpw. During track the groups were the same, 800/1500 group & St/5000m/10000m group, the workouts were different most of the time for those two groups. I guess from what J.O. wrote it wasn't "proper", however, I do have 11 national championship rings in my safe at home. I wonder how my coach was able to pull that off without knowing how to "properly coach." Oh well, just dumb luck I guess. Probably coaching me to 6 All Americans and my roommate to 7 All Americans was just dumb luck as well. I don't know how we managed back then without all the "proper coaching" that goes on now days. I might figure it out one day if I ever get as smart as J.O.
Sounds like you had a great career and are justifiably happy with how it all went. However, what tends to happen when everyone trains in a big group is that some people really benefit from the training, while others falter. Could be due to injury, or burnout, or just stagnation. For every guy you trained with who didn't pan out, was the training "proper" for them? Maybe those guys needed a little more attention, who knows.
That's nice that it worked out for you, but I'd guess a fair number of people flamed out or failed to improve. It's a tradeoff.
Hardly any customization/individualization....The only way my coach individualized my training is my coach tried to discourage me 2 months ago from crapping in a teammates compression socks because he knew I had crapped a pair at a running store already in our area and he didn't think it was a nice thing to do. I told him not to worry as I wouldn't do it to anyone on our team.