Never started one of these threads, but thought I'd get some other people's thoughts on something. My top girl has always been a sprinter in track, but converted to distance this year. Ran 1917 this fall on a fast course which was a 1:15 PR over last year. She ran 58 flat in the 400 last year and 2:20 on 1/2/400 training. (I wasn't coaching her until this summer)
She's getting ready for an indoor meet at the end of december and will try to run a fast enough 16 to garner some scholarship interest. She took a few days off after XC and we are doing a 6 week build up to get ready and then she'll get a longer break before we start getting ready for outdoor. She has a really solid base from XC so I think she is ready to handle some faster stuff at this point.
So today she ran one of my favorite 1600 meter workouts and crushed it. Its a compound interval workout with sets of 200/400/200. 200s are at roughly 800 pace and the 4s at roughly 1600 pace. 30 secs rest between each interval and 3 minutes rest between sets. I had my top 3 boys run the workout with her to push her. They started at 35s on the 2s and 78 on the 4s for the first 3 sets. On the 4th set, they dropped the 4 to 75. 5th set the 2s were 34s and the 4 was 73. 2s stayed in the 33-34 range the rest of the way and the 4s went 73, 72, 68. Ended up being a total of 8 sets and she's the first high school kid I've had do more than 6 sets on their first time doing it. This workout has been a pretty solid indicator for my top guys in the past (I've coached a few sub 420 guys), but I've never had a girl at this level so I'm not sure if it will translate exactly the same way. Then again, I've never had a male distance runner with 49 mid to high speed which is roughly what I'd say a 58 flat would translate to. My thought would be that she has a good shot to run under 5:10 indoors next month and should be in position to break 5 outdoors if all goes well. Would love to get some other coach's thoughts on it. Thanks in advance.