feeling all the racing wrote:
Any advice for high school athletes who are constantly racing to the point where you are dead at the end of the season? We race a lot at my school and the coaches do not seem to understand how much it takes out of us. Physically it takes a huge toll by the last few weeks of the season but the mental toll is also tough. It takes away the excitement of racing and makes every race a grind especially knowing that you will be going at it again in a couple of hours. I am talking about racing 2-4 times a week during indoor and outdoor track for a very large part of each season.
This is what some of the so-called coaches above don't seem to know how or want to deal with.
We have somewhat similar issues in D1 where there is basically a race every weekend, but a few years ago when I was coaching HS, it was TWO races every week: a dual meet on wed/thu, and an invitational on the weekend. We had two races a week, almost every week for 6 or 7 weeks in a row. Our lesser or younger athletes usually didn't get into the invitationals, so it was really only potentially 2 races a week for the top people. We tried to hold our best athletes out of duals, and sometimes had them tempo something like a 3200, which was toward the end of the meets (so we could tell if we needed people to really race it to win the meets--usually we didn't).
I would say if you have more than one meet a week, you pick your spots. Just like the top guys like Rupp and Bekele actually race few 10000s, you really can't go out doing multiple events more than once a week and expect to improve over a season. So some of the meets, you hold back because you have to. You might also hold back in some workouts if you are racing twice a week, and run recovery runs s-l-o-w-l-y.