CWRP wrote:
Outstanding thread. I'm glad it got bumped.
I see a lot of training but not a lot of racing. I'm curious how this might work for:
A. College distance runners (track).
B. HS XC that races weekly.
C. HS Track with dual meet & invitational weekly.
HS track schedule has a lot of racing. Often dictated by the league or head coach. How would you deal with a track season with 1-2 races on a weekly basis March through May?
First off, without scouring through the thread to see exactly what V said, the basic types of workouts described here are going to be of max benefit in your base/pre-competition phases, IMO. Once you get to competition season, these types of workouts will probably get squeezed to the back burner and only find there way into a macrocycle sufficient for basic maintenance (with the possible exception of your speed-based 800m types).
For a College distance runner, they're competing at most once a week and even then, until late in the season probably only every other meet (at most) will be an emphasis on outright race performance.
In early competition season where they are probably still getting quality Tempo/LT sessions in, these types of workouts are great to do the day before Tempo/LT.
An example of an intentionally tough early competition phase week could be
Monday: 7 x 50m full speed sprints
Tuesday: 25 Minute Tempo
Wednesday: Easy run for XXX
Thursday: Workout around 3k-5k race pace or 800-mile pace
Friday: Easy run for XXX
Saturday: low-priority race at the distance they didn't work Thursday
Sunday: Easy run for XXX
Personally, I'd avoid doing one of these hard sprint workouts late in the week (thursday or later with a Saturday competition) since their nervous system is going to be fried for a couple days (especially if you're coupling the sprints workout with challenging lifts after, which I'd advocate), which is in my opinion more harmful to race with than tired legs from a hard VO2 max type workout.
Weekly XC meets in College or HS wouldn't be that different from the above's general outline for a 'hard' week. An example follow-up week to the above week might be (assume they did a 1500 workout on the above, and raced a 5k XC race):
Monday: 20-25 Minute Tempo
Tuesday: Easy run for XXX
Wednesday: 8 x 80m uphill sprints
Thursday: Easy run for XXX or Rest
Friday: Rest or Easy Run for XXX
Saturday: Higher priority XC race (higher priority for early in the season, that is)
Sunday: Easy run for XXX
You'd have to essentially write out a whole macro-cycle to properly show how competitions fit into training, if you're using 10 or 12 day micro-cycles, so I'm just going with a pair of 7-day cycles, though I do prefer 10-day micros as well.
For multiple meets in a single week for HS Track... there are simply too many variables to lay out a specific schedule. The important thing to keep in mind both in that and everywhere else is that races are training stimulus. I see a lot of HS coaches who ignore this and wind up week in and week out having their kids do a workout at mile pace, then race the mile on the weekend, meaning at best they are going to get 1 other workout in a different stimulus range on a given week. Ultimately a HS coach with multiple meets every week is probably going to have to make tough decisions on early season wins/losses vs championship season, and long term athlete development.