Tried something new today:
Had my runners do a steady state run. The directions were to go as fast as they could without feeling any discomfort. They said, "like a little slower than tempo?" and I said, "Exactly". To make sure they didn't cheat, I started them 1 minute apart like a cycling time trial, except I started the fastest first so that they wouldn't be tempted to exceed the target effort as they caught slower runners.
The weaker runners did 2.8 miles, the middle group did 3.9 miles and the top group did 4.5 miles (these distances are from loops we can do from the school without having to cross any main streets). MY plan is to have the athletes run the same courses as a test, once a month until the racing season starts. We did the run today without watches and the plan is to do the monthly tests without watches. I am planning to chart their progress over the next 3 months.
I've told the kids that we are going to make steady state running a focus of our off season conditioning program; that we are going to focus on being able to do longer and longer runs at steady state effort while building our mileage. We will likely do one "official" steady state run per week, but the kids will be free to throw in steady miles on some of their other runs if they are feeling good.
My hunch is that I can get some pretty good data by charting the progress of runs done at the same subjective effort. The data probably won't be as good as if we were to do time trials, or use a monitor to maintain a constant heart rate or have a laboratory to do lactate testing, but I feel like doing a test like this will give a nice, periodic mental boost to the athletes as they see their improvement. I also feel like this test is pretty low stress and non threatening.
Anybody ever used a test like this? I've seen all sorts of other field tests for lactate threshold and vo2 max and what not, but I've never heard of a subjective sub lactate test. If you've used a test like this, how good of a predictor for improvement was it? I certainly don't think that if a kid progresses 10 seconds per mile on this specific test that his 5k PR will magically get 31 seconds faster....but I'd like to think that seeing improvements on this test will at least somewhat correlate with racing improvement.
Interesting results from today: My #6 man had the top overall time and my #8 man had the #2 time. Most of my varsity guys were within a few seconds per mile of one another. I think the #8 guy was running too hard, but I also think that he really under performed during the season....maybe he was over trained and now that he's rested up a bit, his performance is getting back to where I thought it should be relative to his teammates (he was our #4 returner from the 2012 season). #1 man did not run, because he just ran the cross country state meet last weekend and is taking a couple of weeks off.