I have some serious eighth graders ready to step up this season. For MS cross country the event distance is a 3k. For an early season workout about a month from the first race, is 3x1000 at goal race pace good? Or would they benifit from a different workout.
Is it good? No, it's great!
You have a sound head for this stuff. Keep up the good (no, great!) work.
Middle school kids need to work on the opposite ends of training. Aerobic strength with just distance runs, and also short speed. Why do you think soccer kids turn into amazing runners in high school? Don't try to get technical. Allow them to fall in love with running by showing them cool trails, places to run, tracking their mileage in a week and see how far they ran! And, do some speed work to help with coordination, true running form, etc....
oppositeends wrote:
Middle school kids need to work on the opposite ends of training. Aerobic strength with just distance runs, and also short speed. Why do you think soccer kids turn into amazing runners in high school? Don't try to get technical. Allow them to fall in love with running by showing them cool trails, places to run, tracking their mileage in a week and see how far they ran! And, do some speed work to help with coordination, true running form, etc....
Yeah I don't think the workouts matter at all as long as they aren't too hard
oppositeends wrote:
Middle school kids need to work on the opposite ends of training. Aerobic strength with just distance runs, and also short speed. Why do you think soccer kids turn into amazing runners in high school? Don't try to get technical. Allow them to fall in love with running by showing them cool trails, places to run, tracking their mileage in a week and see how far they ran! And, do some speed work to help with coordination, true running form, etc....
This^ and the occasional 3 x 1k to help with pace judgement.
No, just have middle school kids do easy fun running. They don't need real workouts. just show them that running is fun. Besides, they'll improve a lot anyways with just like 25 miles a week of easy running. The goal shouldn't be to get kids to run fast in eighth grade, it should be to have them run fast years down the road.
Patrick Star wrote:
No, just have middle school kids do easy fun running. They don't need real workouts. just show them that running is fun. Besides, they'll improve a lot anyways with just like 25 miles a week of easy running. The goal shouldn't be to get kids to run fast in eighth grade, it should be to have them run fast years down the road.
This is complete nonsense and illustrates your (and above posters) ignorance of youth running.
The notion that kids can not or should not run hard, do workouts, race hard, etc is NONSENSE. NON FRIGGIN SENSE!
All that kind of thinking does is ensure that most kids will have no success since most kids, just based on numbers, will be anonymous also rans in HS. Many kids can and do outwork other kids and have successful, positive, experiences in their youth that they remember for a lifetime and that positively impacts their lives.
Most kids athletic careers end when they get to HS and most of the remaining kids careers end when they graduate HS.
Why should they forgo potential success as kids? For what?
Back to the OP, that's an easy workout for 8th graders. 3x mile or 5x 1k is a better idea. That's what the kids winning the race are doing. At least that much.
Agreed, also agree with some of the above posters. The kids who really like it will continue. Take grant fisher, he was running 4:47 for the 1600 in 8th grade and he finished a successful season as a college freshman. Another kid is one I knew and he ran 5:08 last year as an eight grader and his freshman year he ran 4:37 and 9:52. We shouldn't burn out and injure our runners but we don't need to hold them back either.
Coacher guy wrote:Back to the OP, that's an easy workout for 8th graders. 3x mile or 5x 1k is a better idea. That's what the kids winning the race are doing. At least that much.
Most of the kids winning the high school races are the ones who swam, cycled, or played soccer, basketball, baseball, football, frisbee, etc on a regular basis in middle school. Not the ones who ran hard distance workouts regularly at age 13.
3x1600 or 5x1k is a really good way to make middle schoolers hate running.
If you have kids running 20 - 25 miles a week with the occasional workout (I'd say keep the intervals shorter if you can, and if you want a workout with volume, go with fartlek type things--long intervals just bore kids that age) the kids with athletic backgrounds and some talent will be running around 2:15 / 4:55 by the end of season. That's plenty fast enough to do well on a middle school level, and the kids will have enough of a base to be successful--and will not bored with running--by the time they hit high school.
The best male high school runner I ever trained with went around 48/1:50 (4/8) as a senior. In 8th grade he ran 2:11 and 4:50 (8/16). As a middle schooler he played basketball and soccer, but only ran track in 8th grade, and only because his friends forced him to--he ran under 20 miles a week, but had fun doing it and thus continued with track freshman year. He and his friends ended up being some of the most dedicated runners I knew, and all ended up stronger athletes for it.
The best female high school runner I ever trained with went something along the lines of 4:45/10:10 (16/32). Her primary sport was soccer up until her junior year of high school, and although she ran track in middle school, she only went about 5:35 (16)--good, but not the sort of thing that suggested the times she would eventually run. She built up her mileage very slowly over the course of her running career, probably hitting a max of about 45 MPW her senior year.
Another one of the best female runners I ever trained with went 54/2:15 (4/8), and the team's head coach and I always felt she could have run closer to 2:05 if she'd ever been willing to run the 8 (the first time she ever ran the event as a freshman she went something like 59/76--it was enough to make her never touch the event again, although it could have undoubtedly been her strongest). In middle school she played soccer, ran 2 - 3 miles a few times a week, and had a 400 PR of about 65.
Let the kids learn to love running. If you're coaching middle schoolers, have at least one or two fun days a week. Give kids time to explore the field events in addition to running, and think about long term development rather than short term success.
cali boy is right on
Spot on.
I HATED running in middle school. In fact I played soccer and was on the swim team. Yet I won every race in track rather easily despite being on literally like 5 miles a week.
I hated running so much in middle school that when we went on runs I would literally sneak into the woods and then go chill somewhere with some pot-head friends for the 30-45 minutes or so the team were actually running. If someone had tried to force me to run workouts in track I would have just quit the team and played baseball or something in the spring. My teammates resented me for that but instead they should have resented their parents for gifting them with poor genes.
I ran low 4:50s for the mile in my first season ever in track (8th grade) and I think it was 2:07 or something for the 800m. I ended up in the 4:10s / 1:50 flat by my senior year.
I'd imagine most kids would have a hard time pacing a 1k repeat workout correctly. This seems like a workout a 3k racer would do 2-4 weeks out from a championship race.
My question would be: if this is a good workout for early in the season, what would you have them do later in the season?
I'll echo some others and say I think this is a really, really bad idea.
The most important thing for young runners is to make sure they enjoy it and want to keep training and competing. Long intervals in the range of 1k-1.6k are some of the most mentally challenging workouts that distance runners do. IF you ever decide to do a workout like this, do it once, late in the season. Build it up, let them know it'll be tough, and try to get them excited about it in advance.
You also don't need those kinds of workouts for young runners to keep developing. Just running miles will continue to pay dividends at that age. Most kids end up getting some really good higher end aerobic work in the context of their distance runs anyway because they often end up half-stepping each other. I would continue to focus on high end speed for nervous-system training.
Even if you want to do really hard interval workouts, 3x1k is a bit of an odd duck. Typically the point of interval workouts is the recovery interval. The recovery is what stresses your left ventricle and increases stroke volume, and it's also what trains the body to clear anaerobic waste. Three total reps isn't much of an interval workout. It's more like a broken tempo run that you might use as a buildup to a non-stop tempo.
The ones winning HS races are the ones with the most talent. It matters not what they did in middle school but given 2 equally talented runners, the one with prior training will likely have more success.
And for sure, kids winning regional and national level youth titles train hard. That's a fact.
Citing swimming as if it's some magical activity is also idiotic. Swimmers put in way more monotonous practice than runners and probably suffer more burnout. And swimming is a prime example of a sport where if you DONT do crazy specialized practice as a kid, you have no chance.
In running it's optional for sure, if you want to pick up running in HS and you're talented, you'll have success. For the 95% of middle school kids who aren't going to be stars though, it makes little sense not to put an honest effort in. Why"save yourself" for something that's never going to happen?
I literally know HS coaches who don't weight train because some college told them they want their kids untrained. I said screw that college coach, most kids aren't running in college, of those that do, most are not stars or even close. But we're supposed to sacrifice success at the HS level so some kollege klown can show how much he "improved" "his" athlete? Go screw.
You sir are a stubborn arse and I pity anyone who has to run under you.
Students who are too young or immature to train hard as a 10 year old could be permantely turned off to running forever with your ham-handed approach.
Most kids run in middle school as a default option, not because they have some burning desire to "be the best that they can be." You need to give these kids the opportunity to fall in love with hard training on their own, if t ever happens, rather than ramming it down their throats.
Alright thanks. Problem is the coach last year literally just made the distance team run to a nearby fire station (2.6 miles) all 3 days (Tuesday Wednesday and Thursday) we had practice. She implemented no speed whatsoever other than telling the kids to sprint the end of the run. Then 3 days before the qualifying meet she made the kids do 800/400 repeats. Our distance team was managed really poorly.
I'm not talking about 10 year olds. I'm talking about a few of my eight graders capable of running sub 10 3k's this year. I get it, make running fun and I will.
You can make running fun and beneficial at the same time.
If te kids are 10 min 3k runners, it's fine to train them like 10 min 3k runners who are 15-17.
3x1k is a bad workout for early in the season.
Yeah totally got it. I'll keep it easy and fun, maybe a fartlek or tempo and keep them fresh. Thanks for the input.
Please please don't listen to these idiots. I was at youth regionals this weekend and I was talking with a couple coaches of the kids who do extremely well at nationals year in and year out. These kids have a mini version of an elite high schoolers workout. Now who knows what they will become, but I see these kids and they look pretty hungry to me. There's a kid named Brandon Miller (he's 14) from Missouri who is probably the best youth runner in the USA. That kid has been crushing national records since he was nine and he's looking stronger than ever. Now I'm not saying go saddle a kid with forty miles a week continuous, but giving them some structure and preparing them for running in high school is not a bad idea either.
We don't need to kill them, but it is our job to prepare them. Oh but what about fun? Seriously, when is running fun when you are trying to win? Doing your best is the fun part. Getting better is the fun part. The training is what they do to get to those points. Is working fun? No, but the money you get from working sure is. So why teach children that if its not fun I'm not doing it mentality? Teach them to work for their goals and understand that some things take hard work to achieve. So what if they quit. I promise you if they quit they weren't that great to start with. As long as the workouts aren't too tough or too static, kids need to be doing them to learn the right way to achieve goals from a young age. At least that's what my family does and I know my kids felt pretty good walking around regionals with five gold medals out of five middle distance events between the two of them. maybe the workouts weren't always fun, but walking around with some serious hardware sure is!