My coach doesn't believe in thresholds and has us do only interval work. Is this normal for college?

runners that distrust their coaches aren't very good. maybe you should just go along with it. It is also nearing competition phase for most collegians - hence interval work is good.

lolwut wrote:

runners that distrust their coaches aren't very good. maybe you should just go along with it. It is also nearing competition phase for most collegians - hence interval work is good.

Not distrusting, just asking as this is very different from how my hs coach had us train. And we've been training like this since January, not just recently. Is that normal?

I hope it's not typical for many colleges

The post about not trusting your coach is useless. Probably a failed coach himself that pulls workouts out of a hat.

But to answer your question: No it is not the typical way to train in college if you have a competent coach.

I had the experience (for better and worse) of having a few college coaches during my career. One of them who was very full of himself decided to neglect tempo and threshold work and our team made little to no progress during his remaining time at the university.

Even if you believe in it, you will make little progress if you are a 10k guy. It sounds to me like your coach has no idea what he is doing.

trollololololololol

lolwut wrote:

trollololololololol

I suggest you do some research on distance training and maybe analyze many different sources. No doubt that interval work is important near the end of the season, but if the OP isn't doing threshold work I don't see any basis for long term improvement. Everyone is different though. I guess you reached all of your goals and ran competitively off of nothing but easy runs and track work at the same pace?

Froshy wrote:

I shouldn't say we never do thresholds, but we do about 1 every two weeks, and it's usually only 10-15 minutes, and we always do intervals either before or after it. So in two weeks time we usually do a lot of 200m-1000m reps with one workout looking something like 3x300m with 90s rest, 10 min tempo, 8x200m hard with 1:00 rest. Even 10k guys rarely do more threshold work than that. Is this the typical way to train in college?

That sounds ok for in season work. With such short rests, those are probably tempo intervals. But what are you doing for preseason? That's when you're supposed to focus on tempo runs.

Just thinking wrote:

That sounds ok for in season work. With such short rests, those are probably tempo intervals. But what are you doing for preseason? That's when you're supposed to focus on tempo runs.

Is 400m-5000m pace considered tempo in college? If we do 200m reps they're usually around 30s. I think the slowest I've ever done reps at is 4:55 pace, which is my 5k race pace. Most are done around mile pace. Is that considered tempo in college?

I don't know what you mean by preseason. We train pretty much like this year-round, just in cross-country we did the workouts based on time rather than distance since we weren't on the track, so reps 30s, 45s, 60s, etc.

By cruise intervals you mean running slow? Don't see how that will help you for the mile.

Froshy, what division school do you go to??

Yet another freshman genius....

In the off season what paces are you running? You can get plenty of tempo/threshold stuff then. Contrary to what too many people think, threshold has a limited shelf life as to how it can help you in track. As long as your steady runs are sufficient enough to elicit the magically "threshold" response, then you would be fine. Get out of Daniels for a minute and check out Horwill and Coe for a change and see how you feel then.

I don't understand the hostility towards the OP. The guy is reading things probably by Daniels and other well respected coaches and sees there's a big difference -- is this really hard to understand? I'd be the same way.

From my experience, the type of coaches the OP is talking about always go on and on about "turnover" and say things like "just do a hard effort".

That is not good training, and is in fact a pile of stinky poo

Be Advised wrote:

I don't understand the hostility towards the OP. The guy is reading things probably by Daniels and other well respected coaches and sees there's a big difference -- is this really hard to understand? I'd be the same way.

From my experience, the type of coaches the OP is talking about always go on and on about "turnover" and say things like "just do a hard effort".

That is not good training, and is in fact a pile of stinky poo

Agreed. These coaches crack me up, as they cant explain what they mean by "turnover". I know tons of runners who have the turnover to clip off a 4:45 mile in training, but don't incorporate any other type of work into their training and because of it can only run 15:30 in the 5k.

It is also important to consider what the OP means by threshold. I know some people who take tempo runs to be threshold and incorporate these into their training weekly throughout the whole year. I've seen 29:30 10k guys use tempo runs every week except for the last few before a big race.

Jumbo Elliot was worth 100 Jack Daniels. His runners never ran tempos. EOT.

You guys are idiots. Lactate threshold has been shown to be the best indicator of performance over every distance from 1500m on up (check Noakes' Lore of Running if you don't believe me). It also has the most room for improvement and this is evident in the fact the average age of lifetime PRs for distance runners is 27-28, a time when anaerobic power and speed has already started to wane, but when aerobic ability is still on the rise. Long term aerobic development is the single most important part of distance training. I thought everyone knew this. Have you guys never heard of Lydiard? Do you guys not know that elite runners typically run a lot of miles and have for decades? Beyond that, threshold workouts maintain aerobic fitness while doing other forms of work. Completely ignoring them allows aerobic fitness to crumble. Even Coe says this, and he was more of a speedwork kind of guy. If you look at his logs in Better Training for Distance Runners, you'll see he did primarily threshold work much of the year and maintained some threshold work even into racing season.

The OP said nothing about Daniels and seems to be just going off of how he was trained in high school. You guys seem to be illiterate morons who've never read a thing about proper training. I'm honestly stunned there are this many of you on a running messageboard.

To the OP, no it's not normal, or if it is, there are a lot of bad coaches out there. None of the successful programs I've read about or had friends on train like this. I suspect your team is not very good.

Is it worth my time? wrote:

By cruise intervals you mean running slow? Don't see how that will help you for the mile.

Dont listen to this moron. If you run 60 miles per week only 10 per cent should be done hard/fast if that.

Is it worth my time? wrote:

By cruise intervals you mean running slow? Don't see how that will help you for the mile.

Cruise intervals are like the interval form of a tempo run. Same benefits. Instead of one long sustained high aerobic effort, you do intervals at a faster pace with either a short standing rest or a longer rest but still running (like a fartlek). So this pace could range from 400m pace to 5k race pace to make up for the rests (since you dont get to rest during a normal tempo run). But it would still be a tempo workout and not a speed workout.

The main concern you should have with your coach is... Are you improving? If you are, then you got nothing to worry about.

Why the hostility? Kid reads a book or two and hasn't even been in the program for a full year and he's the genius and coach doesn't get it? Thanks for the chuckle, Sparky.

Is it possible that your coach expects you are doing faster tempo/threshold running in your free time and would rather spend formal training sessions doing more structured workouts?