Is my team doing too many hard miles this summer?

I actually like your program. Looks like fun.

agreed

I'm assuming you are on a women's team, right?

So what's your ideal plan? Run a bunch of 8:00-9:00 miles and then plan on running 5:00-5:30/mile this fall?

This schedule is perfectly fine. The last thing I would want for a team is a bunch of guys who had barely moved their legs faster than 6:00-7:00/mile for 2 months. If anything I'd throw another tempo or fartlek in there.

1) Their legs will get trashed with all of those intense high-mileage workouts. Injury likelihood increases greatly.

2) Mental/physical burnout.

No one can tell just from reading a post whether or not any given training plan is right for you or your team. Clearly, you are unhappy with this plan. Your options are (In order from most to least preferred):

1. Just trust your coach and do the plan, it may or may not work out -if your coach knows what he's doing it probably will

2. Talk to your coach about your concerns and see if he can address them for you

3. Quit the team and run on your own

If you and your teammates start deciding to do your own thing while still running for this coach, it probably won't go very well for anyone.

Dude, I'm in high school with only 2 years of experience. What do you expect?

ColoradoBeast wrote:

Here's what our average week looks like:

Monday: hard day, we do 7-9 miles almost as fast as we can (don't go all out, but we're definitely feeling it). I do these runs at about 6:10-6:30 pace.

Tuesday: 6-7 miles, easy. Maybe 8:00 pace.

Wednesday: trail run in the mountains, extremely hard effort going up, and moderately hard effort going down (but still really fast, as it's downhill). My pace up the trail is 8:10, and it gets down to 5:15 on the downhill.

Thursday: 6-7 miles, easy. Again, 8:00 pace.

Friday: 6-7 miles, not hard, but not easy. Around 7:10 pace.

Saturday: 13-14 mile long run, about 6:45 pace.

We do doubles on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, doing 4-5 miles at around 8:30 pace.

I'm afraid we're all going to burn out by State.

How can I sign up?

Ok good, with all this talk about SOM, it seems like doing more than one moderately hard run per week will burn everyone out by September.

It's unusual for high school to have such a long tempo run, and you are at altitude. But it is also unusual not to have high schoolers running lots of short, fast workouts. This is a very fine program and will set you up for a great season if you commit to it and do strengthening exercises targeted at areas that feel like they are getting injured.

ColoradoBeast wrote:

Here's what our average week looks like:

Monday: hard day, we do 7-9 miles almost as fast as we can (don't go all out, but we're definitely feeling it). I do these runs at about 6:10-6:30 pace.

Tuesday: 6-7 miles, easy. Maybe 8:00 pace.

Wednesday: trail run in the mountains, extremely hard effort going up, and moderately hard effort going down (but still really fast, as it's downhill). My pace up the trail is 8:10, and it gets down to 5:15 on the downhill.

Thursday: 6-7 miles, easy. Again, 8:00 pace.

Friday: 6-7 miles, not hard, but not easy. Around 7:10 pace.

Saturday: 13-14 mile long run, about 6:45 pace.

We do doubles on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, doing 4-5 miles at around 8:30 pace.

I'm afraid we're all going to burn out by State.

With 10-12 weeks of summer training...

If the first 4 weeks were at 65-70% HRmax, and the next 6 weeks were at 70% HRmax, then you edged into 75% the 1st month of XC, then 80% lactate thresholds mixed in the 2nd month of XC, (but 1 easy week the 7th week of XC...mid-season) then speed focusing the 3rd month of XC...I personally would feel good about that.