Replacing Intervals With Longer, Faster Efforts

Note: General fitness stuff = body weight exercises such as burpies, bear crawl, push up, lunges.....done with short rest so that heart rate stays elevated. The rationale is that we run less miles due to heat but still need the aerobic effort. + I feel total body fitness is a benefit to us.

the problem potentially is that not all athletes, even if they share an event, react the same way to 'work'. They all need it, bbut in varying degrees, and types.

Some will be hurt from over work, some will be able to handle more.

The real skill in coaching is to correctly identify which athletes, and find the best coaching plan to maximize their individual potential.

Or you can do what a lot of coaches here (USA) do, just blow the whistle and know that the weak will drop and the injured will move on, and you'll have a new crop of kids next year.

playmethatsongagain wrote:

the problem potentially is that not all athletes, even if they share an event, react the same way to 'work'. They all need it, bbut in varying degrees, and types.

Some will be hurt from over work, some will be able to handle more.

The real skill in coaching is to correctly identify which athletes, and find the best coaching plan to maximize their individual potential.

Or you can do what a lot of coaches here (USA) do, just blow the whistle and know that the weak will drop and the injured will move on, and you'll have a new crop of kids next year.

I´m not sure is it possible to drop the team/group work and to create a personal schedule for each individual.

In my opinion OP´s thoughts sounds good. I would keep doing 1 short hill accelerations/sprints with full recovery in the base phase, including some basic drills in the warm up. Would be extra careful on the 3200 pace workouts. 200´s are ok, not too long reps.

1 longer progression / LT run per week, and 1 cruise interval workout (could vary with the 3200m pace work). On cruise intervals I would start from ~LT and increase the pace towards the end of the workout, totalling ~ 8x800m / 60-90 sec jog rec. With 800m reps you can do more repetitions and use the first reps to warm up the engine well before going a bit faster in the end, increasing intensity towards the end of the base, assuming that the fitness is improving.

UNO wrote:

I´m not sure is it possible to drop the team/group work and to create a personal schedule for each individual.

In my opinion OP´s thoughts sounds good. I would keep doing 1 short hill accelerations/sprints with full recovery in the base phase, including some basic drills in the warm up. Would be extra careful on the 3200 pace workouts. 200´s are ok, not too long reps.

1 longer progression / LT run per week, and 1 cruise interval workout (could vary with the 3200m pace work).

This is exactly what I was thinking about doing. Alternating the 3200 pace stuff with cruise intervals. So, upcoming week would be CI stuff.

Overall early season week looks okey, but how do you think about using in fact 4 quality workouts in last week? Just 2-3 real easy days in the week?

COACH J.S å ä ö wrote:

Overall early season week looks okey, but how do you think about using in fact 4 quality workouts in last week? Just 2-3 real easy days in the week?

That is something that is on my mind. I think I took the intensity down far enough on the M,W workouts so that those two days are only "moderate" days. So it would be 2 hard days, 2 moderate days, 3 easy days.

CoachB wrote:

COACH J.S å ä ö wrote:

Overall early season week looks okey, but how do you think about using in fact 4 quality workouts in last week? Just 2-3 real easy days in the week?

That is something that is on my mind. I think I took the intensity down far enough on the M,W workouts so that those two days are only "moderate" days. So it would be 2 hard days, 2 moderate days, 3 easy days.

The "cardinal" mistake is to do 2 hard days + 2 moderate days. The moderate days will not give that recovery your young guys need(48-72 hours). Try one fast interval type session and one tempo/ cruise interval session once per week and you will get a fast response. Good luck!

Off-topic Coach, but I remember a few years ago you had a middle distance kid who almost always suffered from shin problems and couldn't do a lot of distance. I've got something similar right now in that I've got a kid who can do short (up to like 10 minutes) of solid running, but anything easy paced or long (45 minutes+) and his shins start killing him to the point he has to stop. Do you have any ideas to help?

I'm in agreement with the previous poster about 2 moderate days plus 2 hard might be too much. Perhaps early season you could rotate one week 2h+1M then 2H+2M the following week so there would be more recovery. Especially with the heat you describe, the body is already at a negative due to that.

Audax wrote:

Off-topic Coach, but I remember a few years ago you had a middle distance kid who almost always suffered from shin problems and couldn't do a lot of distance. I've got something similar right now in that I've got a kid who can do short (up to like 10 minutes) of solid running, but anything easy paced or long (45 minutes+) and his shins start killing him to the point he has to stop. Do you have any ideas to help?

I'm in agreement with the previous poster about 2 moderate days plus 2 hard might be too much. Perhaps early season you could rotate one week 2h+1M then 2H+2M the following week so there would be more recovery. Especially with the heat you describe, the body is already at a negative due to that.

Yeah, this week thursday won't be hard. We're running a time trial in Wednesday afternoon.

As far as shin splints go, we do a series of exercises before every practice

Toe walks with toes in, neutral, out

Heel walks with toes in, neutral, out

balance on a sligtly bent leg for 30 seconds (each leg)

balance on a slighttly bent leg and do ankle rotations 10 x in each direction on the opposite leg.

I've got 55 kids, lots of beginners and in the first 2 weeks I've had only one complaint about shins. This is a huge reduction from a few years back, before we started doing these exercises.

I'm not sure why you think crawling around on the ground and doing burpees is an alternative to running just because it's hot.

Do you not do any long runs? If you truly want to build the mental capacity for long sustained efforts, there's nothing better than a long run.

Perhaps the 8-9 mile progression is your long run?

The Saturday run is our long effort. For girls running around < or = 40mpw, 8-9 miles is within the 20-25% of weekly volume window. 9 would take them around 70min.

hot to wut? wrote:

I'm not sure why you think crawling around on the ground and doing burpees is an alternative to running just because it's hot.

I ignored this at first, but ok, I'll bite.

It is my feeling that many of the kids that we coach these days don't come to us with good basic fitness and general athleticism. To be sure, I get kids who have a history with basketball, youth soccer or swim or other sports that have developed a little general athletecism. However, the bulk of the kids that come to me are generally very weak. I don't want to sound like a crusty old, "back in my day" type of guy, but I am certain that kids don't participate in the same levels of general play and rambunctiousness as my friends and I did when we were kids. So, I spend a lot of time with my rookies doing stuff just to make them fit and athletic. This carries over to my more experienced athletes. As we add running volume we try to keep the same level general athletic fitness type activities. It is only toward the end of the varsity season that we really start to back that stuff off and focus solely on running.

For instance I have kids that are still struggling to run 20 minutes without stopping. This is after 2 weeks of practice already and some of them even came to our summer workouts. Furthermore, I have beginners who are already starting to feel calf and achilles pain at less than 10 miles per week. With them, I have 3 options.

1. Keep the running volume low, but spend time building general fitness

2. Keep the running volume low and just let the kids be weak.

3. Bump up the running volume and make the kids "real runners" but lose a bunch of them in the process.

I don't talk much about my JV kids on here, but they make really good progress every year. In our league of similar size schools, we rarely win the JV division at our league opener in September, but by the end of October, our JV boys and JV girls tend to win a lot.

Plus, there is a lot of cameraderie that gets developed during those sessions.

I really like this idea, especially for less-developed kids. I don't think it works if you have faster, more developed kids (state champs, all-state kids, etc.). Those kids need all the mileage they can get without injuring themselves. Same goes for the long runs, although now I realize that your kids' long runs are the right length.

As for your original question, I would think that your plan to do longer cruise/tempo work is a great idea given your situation. Also many HS programs these days focus too much on pounding hard intervals into kids legs. It's all about getting as much benefit on as little work as possible. Your plan sounds great in that respect

Coach, are you still at Hughson?

Yes. This is year 20

We had mercifully cool weather today. Temps in the low 80s with decent cloud coverage. We did 4x1200 with the varsity groups with about 90 seconds recovery. Everyone very relaxed and smooth looking. Kids were hitting times they normally hit in september or October. I'm certain the weather played a huge role.

Either way, this will be our only interval workout of the week (and it wasn't very hard). TT on wednesday and long on Saturday.