Mini Peak then Mini Base again. Mid season

Good idea.

solid plan

I like the idea.

We have a couple of kids in the same boat - we were thinking of doing as you suggest.

Will report how things go.

I recommend not taking off more than two days for anyone. Having them run slowly and easily for 2-5 days as needed will work wonders. Then doing some higher mileage with slower tempos for a period will return any endurance they may have lost with hard training the last few weeks and make them ready to go.

Well, I'd been talking with my assistant about how well we had been doing avoiding injuries and was thinking that most kids would be able to go into this unstructured period and do just easy runs. Yesterday, during our easy pre meet run, a couple of the girls started complaining about one ailment or another. So, they might need to go on a bike or other cross training deal for this period.

Don't think most of them will need to take time completely off.

about 5 years ago, one of my teams was totally fried at the mid point of the season. I told them to take 4 days completely off. They came back from that pretty crappy, but then actually had a great second half of the season.

They're not going to lose any fitness in 4 days of no running but having some type of activity is better than HS kids sitting around doing nothing. Your plan sounds like a good plan. Give them the break and let them choose. Please report back in a month and tell us how this worked.

Related, we are trying to give our kids mini-breaks - a couple days between training phases as another way to keep them fresh and avoid the situation you describe. Trying to up the training for solid stretch but then also give them breaks to regroup and refresh.

CoachB wrote:

Well, I'd been talking with my assistant about how well we had been doing avoiding injuries and was thinking that most kids would be able to go into this unstructured period and do just easy runs. Yesterday, during our easy pre meet run, a couple of the girls started complaining about one ailment or another. So, they might need to go on a bike or other cross training deal for this period.

Don't think most of them will need to take time completely off.

about 5 years ago, one of my teams was totally fried at the mid point of the season. I told them to take 4 days completely off. They came back from that pretty crappy, but then actually had a great second half of the season.

We have all heard this before "jog easily until the athlete feels good again".

That is what we are going to do as some of our girls seem a bit run down.

So far, the plan seems to be working out pretty well. We our Varsity Boys and Frosh Soph boys won our mid season league cluster meet (the VB result was quite an upset actually). The next day, it rained in Hughson and about half the kids chose not to run, as was their right. The ones that did run came back in a great mood, bouncing off the walls and full of pep. Some of my guys drove to a rolling trail along a creek yesterday and my top 5 got together for an easy 9 miler this morning. Others are resting injuries and other, younger kids that don't have much experience are experimenting with longer runs this weekend. For the most part, I think everybody is feeling pretty good mentally and physically right now. Some of the girls were dinged up and had to sit out the mid season league meet but seem to be feeling better with the days off also.

Team is going to go long/easy on Monday then we have a very low key small schools invitational on Wednesday where lots of kids should be able to medal even if they don't have to run that hard. I think that will be a perfect way to come back to harder running.

We're going to Clovis 10 days after that. My Frosh Soph squad should do pretty well there, the bulk of my varsity guys are taking the SAT that day, so I'll be running a mostly JV squad in the varsity race and they will have to run well to avoid last place there. After that, we have 2.5 weeks until our league meet.