For 8 straight yrs,M. Tinsley ran 48 in 400h but never made US team, last yr he added distance runs & won Olympic silver

I don't know why sprinters 400M & lower don't do light jogs or runs. I just don't think you can sprint fast by sprinting and lifting alone. Skinny zit like me dramatically improved 400 meter time with increased mileage in college. Just imagine what it will do to hulking sprinters.

I've always believed even in the 400m, especially at the HS level and some colleges, that the aerobic aspect is not respected.

Agreed. Most 400 guys have speed in excess and can tolerate fantastic amounts of glycolytic stress. The easiest route for improvement is improving their aerobic capacity.

Most sprinters are too lazy and shiftless. Watch their "training" sessions. Plenty of lounging, hardly any work.

Rogan wrote:

Most sprinters are too lazy and shiftless. Watch their "training" sessions. Plenty of lounging, hardly any work.

At least they're not just jogging around all day like distance runners

Rogan wrote:

Most sprinters are too lazy and shiftless. Watch their "training" sessions. Plenty of lounging, hardly any work.

And what sprinters do you watch? the comments on this board just get more and more ignorant...

That's what he said.

oh ya I'm sure long runs is all he added.

Interesting article here by Indiana distance coach Robert Chapman. He cites studies going back to the 1950s showing the traditional view was that the 400m was about 18% aerobic/82% anerobic. But newer studies with better measurement techniques show the event is closer to 44%aerobic/56%anaerobic. I think a lot of old school coaches still train 400 runners as sprinters with little or no aerobic work.

My first year as a track coach, I had a couple of 11th grade guys from the football team who had run the 200/400 for the previous coach (who knew next to nothing about training runners). Their 400 PRs were in the 54-56 range. In pre-season conditioning, I had them do 1-2 mile runs and worked up to 20 minute runs once or twice a week, along with regular preseason 400 work. Then we added 600 and 800 tempo repeats in early season and up to the start of comp season. We kept the 20 minute runs for most of the season. They screamed bloody murder and thought I was killing them.

They were football first guys and I only got them at the start of track season. By the end of their senior years they were running 51/52 for the 400 and one of them added the 300 hurdles and ran around 41 flat. Not great times, but huge improvements for them. I'm convinced it was the "distance" work we did.

I find this all extremely interesting to hear--but also not terribly surprising in some respects.

If you look at just two of Tinsley's races for this season--Drake and Doha (not sure if there have been any others)--he has run incredibly smoothly over the first 300 meters, but it's in the last 100m that he's really proven himself.

Now, I know this has become something of a commonplace when talking about the 400--the race all comes down to who slows down the least--but Tinsley has managed to throw in some incredible surges over the last 50 or so meters, especially after the final hurdle, in both of these races.

It's actually for this reason that I don't think Tinsley was getting enough credit for his Doha victory. Yes, Bershawn clipped the final hurdle, but Tinsley's finishing strength over the race, I think, would still have made him the victor that day--and all because of some regular distance runs.

I have always thought 400h guys should train like 800m guys with added hurdle specific training.

for races over 200m - the aerobic component importance goes up exponentially.

the 400h is like a 500m flat which is quite different from 800m.

to improve your ability, is a mistake to use your energy doing very low intensity work like jogging however.

in the off season you want to be doing a 200-400m sprint program and add on a couple of hard days with 1 minute 30 second repeats up hill, the effort should be hard enough so that you are craving air the last 100 meters of the hill. bring the heart beat down and repeat. work up to six or eight repeats. don't do more. too much is for stupid distance runners.

of course this training hurts - especially the sprinter type.

many sprinters fold and cant take it.

so be it.

real warriors run the 400m and 400h.

The aerobic capacity definitely plays a role, but building it with "long runs" (even of the 30-minute sort) is not necessarily the way to do it. My 400 group made big gains years ago when I added the aerobic runs. They made even bigger ones when I traded steady aerobic for extensive tempo. More than one way to skin a cat when it comes to long sprinters.

It would be interesting to see the training of Harald Schmid. He was able to run sub 48 and 1:44 mid.

gamecock wrote:

The aerobic capacity definitely plays a role, but building it with "long runs" (even of the 30-minute sort) is not necessarily the way to do it. My 400 group made big gains years ago when I added the aerobic runs. They made even bigger ones when I traded steady aerobic for extensive tempo. More than one way to skin a cat when it comes to long sprinters.

Could you elaborate on that? It makes sense but what do they do specifically? Brings to mind Carl Lewis doing tempo 800s.

When I was doing my 400m training, our aerobic stuff was sprinting the straight and jobbing the curves or 1 minute on 1 minute off. More fartlek style stuff.

"to improve your ability, is a mistake to use your energy doing very low intensity work like jogging however."

From my point of view that is the problem. Any 400/400H athlete who thinks of jogging for 20 min, a couple of times a week, as using ANY of their training energy has so little training energy that they will never be close to their potential. That is like saying they better not mow their lawn...

I))&(D%&CXZ%E wrote:

"to improve your ability, is a mistake to use your energy doing very low intensity work like jogging however."

From my point of view that is the problem. Any 400/400H athlete who thinks of jogging for 20 min, a couple of times a week, as using ANY of their training energy has so little training energy that they will never be close to their potential. That is like saying they better not mow their lawn...

Sprinters are too lazy to understand that 20 minutes of jogging isn't even a warmup for a runner, let alone a workout. They lounge around, do a few starts, lounge around, then go home. There is not a sprinter in history who could do a 12 x 400 workout with a good miler. I'd be surprised if 5% of world class sprinters could do the warmup for a 12 x 400 without puking.

If you weren't a slow a** distance runner, you could "lounge around" some and then go home (which is total bullsh*t, btw. Check out a Clyde Hart 200/400 season of workouts from beginning to end, including the weight work).

Fact is, you're a miler because you can't run 100m in under 11, 200m in under 22 or 400 in under 50, therefore you must do 12x400 workouts in 1:10 (or slower) and 12 mile runs.

Sucks to be slow, eh?