Impending Choke wrote:
I'd put my money down the coach never actually said "Run 4:45 for the hards and 5:15 for the easy parts".
I'm guessing it was "run at 2 mile effort" and something along the lines of "don't do the Muhammad Ali shuffle for your rest".
Take the tampon out and run.
More likely the coach read the Mona "Fartlek" description and thought it was a good workout. It is, if adapted to a given individual. Monaghetti thrived off it, but that was him. Instructions need to be specific if taking someone else's session and precribing that to a HS athlete. That would be no different than taking a Canova workout (those 5k's at 15 minutes with 1km recovery in 3.30) and trying to adapt it - perhaps best not to try. I like the poster's suggestion of the consistent recoveries, another coach I know (quite successful) preferred equal time repetition and recovery for HS runners (10 x 1min/1minute recovery) as they tend to respond better to this consistency. Makes sense to me. Taking adult sessions (and not taking into consideration the purpose of the session) and trying to adapt them to HSers is, frankly, one of the problems HS coaches face - which is why they need to know WHY they are giving a specific workout, i.e. what is the purpose of the workout and is it appropriate to the age and experience of the HS runner. Floats (which is the type of recovery in Mona fartlek) are quite difficult for underdeveloped runners to handle - see Dellinger/Bowerman 30/40 Drill - and generally need to be handled with care.
To the OP, this is one session, get over it and move on to other sessions. If this is going to be a consistent session then learn what the purpose of the session is about and how it is best mastered. No coach knows it all, yet that doesn't mean they are not a good coach. Even Salazar and Schumacher screw up sometimes in what they ask their charges to do - everyone is learning (coach and athlete) all the time, and especially how training principles work for any given athlete - people are complex, not robots.