Al sal’s insane training

as little as pros race, i can't really think of any good reason.

Al Sal isn’t the only guy who does post race workouts, and he didn’t invent it. But the reasoning is that after most races, you still tend to have a lot of energy, adrenaline, and other reserves to go off of. You would have recovery days after the race anyways, so you might as well get more work in if the race wasn’t too demanding. I.e race a 1500m and then do a tempo or short reps after. The 1500m isn’t much of a workout, so you might as well get some extra work out of it to not waste a day.

Wiggly worm wrote:

The weight shaming is bad but what is even worse is grinding workouts after a race where the runner clearly leaves it all on the track. Salazar reached out to Cain and her parents to become her coach. She was of course thrilled and thought it would take her to the next level. But what kind of coach has a 17 year old doing workouts that can cause long term damage. He destroyed her physically too.

Can anyone explain the logic behind insane intervals after a killer race?

In fact there is no acceptable logic behind them if it was an all out race followed by insane intervals.....

ThatAverageRunner wrote:

Al Sal isn’t the only guy who does post race workouts, and he didn’t invent it. But the reasoning is that after most races, you still tend to have a lot of energy, adrenaline, and other reserves to go off of. You would have recovery days after the race anyways, so you might as well get more work in if the race wasn’t too demanding. I.e race a 1500m and then do a tempo or short reps after. The 1500m isn’t much of a workout, so you might as well get some extra work out of it to not waste a day.

just getting in a little bit of extra work is one thing. what salazar does is quite another.

Wiggly worm wrote:

Can anyone explain the logic behind insane intervals after a killer race?

You guys arent thinking very hard.

Post-race workouts by itself are nothing bad. Tinman prescribes them after unimportant races, to keep his "only 2 hard days + LR a week" mantra going and get in some threshold or CV work or speed work that was missed on the first hard day.

Salazar does them to teach the body to still keep going and run when everything hurts and is at its limits - think about Hassan hammering down the last lap in a 1500m race, everyone is suffering by that point but the hard post-race workouts put her so often in this situation that she has an advantage.

Now the BIG problem with what Salazar did with Mary Cain. Ever since she heard about Salazar, she was looking up to him. He was the most successful coach in America, and she wanted to do nothing more than make him happy. She trained very hard, did everything he asked her to do and she wanted to be the perfect runner student. Then, in Boston indoor Jan 2014 she beats NCAA champ Abby D'Agostino and Jordan Hasay by running a 4:24 mile as 17-year old girl and setting a BIG PR in 1500/Mile. What does Salazar do? Instead of finally encouraging her and telling her how fantastic her performance was, he sends her on the hardest post-race workout anyone can imagine together with NCAA runner Hasay who had much more mileage and training in her legs at that point. The post-race workout - 4 mile tempo in 5:30 pace, followed by extremely fast 600-400-300 and then an all-out 200 in 27s, made her vomit and destroyed her.

But the biggest damage was done mentally - even the 4:24 mile, running her heart out and beating seasoned NCAA runners was NOT good enough for her coach, instead of celebrating the race with a nice post-race meal or something he sends her on the track to do a superhero workout. She was mentally broken after that day. She was starving to get to this level, suffering through insane workouts with Hasay and Moser, then even manages to beat runners she was not expected to beat and instead of finally allowing her to eat a pizza or burger Salazar puts her on the track to do a "best post-race workout in her life". That would break most 17-year old girls mentally, and I am not surprised she was never the same anymore after (after this race, most of the problems started in early-mid 2014).

Wiggly worm wrote:

The weight shaming is bad but what is even worse is grinding workouts after a race where the runner clearly leaves it all on the track. Salazar reached out to Cain and her parents to become her coach. She was of course thrilled and thought it would take her to the next level. But what kind of coach has a 17 year old doing workouts that can cause long term damage. He destroyed her physically too.

Can anyone explain the logic behind insane intervals after a killer race?

No, I'd say the weight shaming is worse

Could you imagine if Once a Runner was written today? 40 quarters!!! Making fun of a girl with a limp!!! John Parker is so full of hate!

It’s about volume of training. If they race a 5k, that’s only 3.1 miles of quality running. That’s not much compared to their normal hard days

But yeah, no reason to go even further to the well like Salazar had them do. Oddly enough, I never heard of Farah doing post-race workouts. Did he?

SciGuy wrote:

Wiggly worm wrote:

Can anyone explain the logic behind insane intervals after a killer race?

You guys arent thinking very hard.

I'll help them out:

After a race, you have EXCESS in your body....maybe adrenaline....or hormones...or something else...that you want to spend...before peeing in a cup....................so you work out REALLY HARD...to get certain levels lower...again...before going pee in front of someone....

Is this making sense?

high school xc coach wrote:

ThatAverageRunner wrote:

Al Sal isn’t the only guy who does post race workouts, and he didn’t invent it. But the reasoning is that after most races, you still tend to have a lot of energy, adrenaline, and other reserves to go off of. You would have recovery days after the race anyways, so you might as well get more work in if the race wasn’t too demanding. I.e race a 1500m and then do a tempo or short reps after. The 1500m isn’t much of a workout, so you might as well get some extra work out of it to not waste a day.

just getting in a little bit of extra work is one thing. what salazar does is quite another.

I think that depended on the day/time of year and other stuff. For instance, Rupp doing that 4 mile tempo at 4:40 pace on the treadmill plus some strides after racing a mile isn’t really much honestly.

A race is typically on Saturday. They typically did workouts on Tuesday and Friday.

I suppose they would miss a Friday workout but have lots of time until the Tuesday workout. So it made sense to get more workout volume in after a race to make up for the Friday missed workout. However, there’s still lots of time to recover and get greater aerobic volume in before the next Tuesday workout. If the next workout was Monday, I doubt he would of prescribed it.

It’s really a smart approach more programs should take to get more volume intensity in.

Of course all the other shady stuff, no thank you.

Coach LL wrote:

A race is typically on Saturday. They typically did workouts on Tuesday and Friday.

I suppose they would miss a Friday workout but have lots of time until the Tuesday workout. So it made sense to get more workout volume in after a race to make up for the Friday missed workout. However, there’s still lots of time to recover and get greater aerobic volume in before the next Tuesday workout. If the next workout was Monday, I doubt he would of prescribed it.

It’s really a smart approach more programs should take to get more volume intensity in.

Of course all the other shady stuff, no thank you.

Also remember he was training runners to peak once a year at the world championships / Olympics. Every race before that really was just a workout.

I am a fan of post race workouts. Especially in respect to only have 2 workout days per week. Keep the hard days hard, easy days easy. THe tempo stuff was good. probably safe. the breakdowns were a bit much for her level. She had never done anything like that.

'weight-shaming' He pointed out that athletes perform best at their optimal weight. Is he a PR rep trying to brand them?

And any physical career causes long-term damage. Training like a professional athlete is not healthy.

ThatAverageRunner wrote:

Al Sal isn’t the only guy who does post race workouts, and he didn’t invent it. But the reasoning is that after most races, you still tend to have a lot of energy, adrenaline, and other reserves to go off of. You would have recovery days after the race anyways, so you might as well get more work in if the race wasn’t too demanding. I.e race a 1500m and then do a tempo or short reps after. The 1500m isn’t much of a workout, so you might as well get some extra work out of it to not waste a day.

Yep, Jack Daniels wrote about it in his books long before the NOP workout videos were popular. The NOP's basic reasoning is they like to do bigger workouts to be around 10k in volume, so if they just raced an indoor 2-mile, they do about 4 more miles of quality volume.

seems like an ideal time to get injured, especially if you are talking about superhero workouts like 3M tempo + 600-400-300-200 after a mile race (when you've never even done a 3M tempo at 5:30 before) or 5xmile at 10k down to 3k pace after a 2M AR.

You are treating the post race workout like it was a punishment and not just part of the plan. There are plenty of things that Alberto did that I think were morally wrong, but post race workouts were not one of them. It would be different in my mind if Alberto said, "If you run X time, that will be all, but if you are slower, we are going to crush you with a workout." He didn't do that. All of the NOP athletes knew that whether they ran well or not, as long as they were not injured during the race, they would complete a workout after.

I can't cite the source, but I remember reading that part of the reason for the post race workouts was the travel. The race by itself was not enough of a workout, but the travel that often followed the race made it difficult for the athletes to get in another high quality day after the race (remember a lot of the publicized post race workouts were from indoor season, where they ran in Boston). He also talked about working different energy systems in the post race workout than he had worked in the race. So after a shorter race, the focus would be a longer, more aerobic (but not entirely aerobic) effort, where a longer race would be more glycolytic or speed oriented. These race plus workout days were always very taxing because they knew it would be a few days before they would do anything really hard again.

Plenty of reasons to dislike Alberto, but I don't think this is one of them.

Spot on

I think more high school programs should incorporate tempo running into their post race “cooldown.” As you said it would be an opportunity to work an intensity system but provide ample recovery days.