Is this a good tempo workout?

teacherofabove poster wrote:

i totally agree because thats how i coach...pushing the kids to do more just because they can doesnt mean it will benefit them. remember those days when i let you do whatever you wanted

Haha turns out this was my high school coach

I should mention my favorite cruise interval type workout I did in high school- 10x1000 with 1-2 minutes rest. Start at something like half-marathon type effort and work down from there. If you can get down to 3k type effort for the 10th one you've hit this big range of paces and probably feel like you're ready for anything.

yeah that is a BA workout....this though we are going to top that with a baker's dozen! Ten will be the minimum and for those that can we will try and get to that 13th one.

On another note I was craigmac4h's highschool coach and that 10x1000 workout was simply made up one day by me and his other coach. We had no idea how it was going to work and how the kids were going to react to it but they loved it and it has become a staple of the early season. like 16x300 is our end of season staple workout.

3 x 10min w/ 2 min jog rest

I don't think anyone can(should?) do a workout like this at 5k pace. Running 2/3s the race distance 3 times is pretty brutal no matter what type of rest you do.In general the 3x2 mi is a great threshold improvement run. If you are doing it at 10k pace you are generating more lactate than at hm pace so that stresses the system to improve more than the 30 min continuous runs. If you run at HM pace, you are getting in 6 (I have seen up to 10 when you slow it down to marathon pace) miles of quality work which is more than most people can run continuously and still recover.

teacherofabove poster wrote:

like 16x300 is our end of season staple workout.

oh god I remember that one. . . ouch

Can anyone give me a suggestion on what type of workout to do? For reference, I did a workout last week of a 5 mile tempo at 5:26 pace and felt pretty smooth. I'd like to do one of the workouts you guys have been mentioning but I'm not sure what I should do this early in the season/what pace. I ran a 26:20 8k in cross this season but I'm more of a track guy. Thanks a lot.

teacherofabove poster wrote:

like 16x300 is our end of season staple workout.

Did you start out with 16 or did you work up from fewer earlier in the season? Or were the 16 in sets?

Also, at what pace and recovery?

And what energy system were you working? That appears to be a lot of reps for an end of the season workout. That is why I am asking these questions.

love 300 wrote:

teacherofabove poster wrote:

like 16x300 is our end of season staple workout.

Did you start out with 16 or did you work up from fewer earlier in the season? Or were the 16 in sets?

Also, at what pace and recovery?

And what energy system were you working? That appears to be a lot of reps for an end of the season workout. That is why I am asking these questions.

teacherofabove:

I think 300 is a great distance for a workout and I am very interested in your doing 16 of them. If you have time, would you please respond? I am not being critical of the workout. This is of great interest.

This workout was taken by the other coach i work with from his son who went to Penn St. Every year this workout although a staple is done a little differently. Two years ago is was done at a constant pace of 48-52 because the weather was slightly cold and rainy. Whereas this past spring the weather was hot and steamy so we pushed the pace on the 300's. Started at 50-52 then went down to whatever you could get while still being beneficial. As a mantra we have for workouts is..once it becomes detrimental why do it...there is no benefit to running slower than when you started....as far as what system i have no clue never read a running book in my life just coach from experience and experiment. Hope that helps.

As an add on to the above post we hardly coach by pace because how many races truly go according to pace we usually workout by feel meaning when you start out start out comfortable then work your down pace wise but still feeling comfortable.

My old coach is correct, he has never read a running book in his life. He's grown up around track and runners and everything he does is an experiment.

Kevin started coaching my sophomore year of high school, when I was 15. By my senior year (the first year we did the 16x300) he was still experimenting with workouts and the like.

I was training primarily for the 800 when I did this workout, and I dug out my high school log to see how it went-

Verbatim, my log reads:

Warmup, 16x300 w/1 min jog rest. (52, 51, 51, 50, 50, 49, 48, 48, 47, 46, 45, 45, 45, 45, 45, 45). Cold- 35 deg, windy, very rainy. Brutal. 1mi c/d Tot 7"

I remember the first half of the workout feeling very easy and the last half was very, very, difficult. Once I hit 45 seconds, I couldn't go any faster, I don't know if it was the rain or the cold or what. This was one week from the NH Class Championships, where I ran a PR of 1:55.53 for 2nd place, and two weeks out from the State Championships, which I won in 1:56.4, going 60.5/55.9.

As to the running by feel thing, I look back on my workouts from that season now and note that a lot of my speed workouts would start with a 600 or two, somewhere around 2:00, before I got into the faster stuff. I remember a few times I'd run a 600 in 2 flat or so and I'd get ordered off the track because something didn't look right in my stride. Usually, the day after that happened, I'd wake up with a cold, and be glad I didn't do anything stressful the day before.

For all my workouts I was never given a time to hit on a particular interval, only an effort level. I had to learn to interpret stuff like "stride out good on the first few then drop the hammer."

Kevin will probably make fun of me because this is so long winded.

Sorry about that. clicked the wrong place in previous post.

Thank both of you very much for your replys. Sounds like very good COACHING.

sorry letsrun:

With 35 degrees - how early in the season was this do you know? Also, if you ran the 800 your junior year, could I ask your time? What other events did you run? and times?

About how many times that season did you do that workout?

This is interesting. Thank you sorry letsrun!

Thank you Coach!

I'm the one who posted under "sorry letsrun" before. . .my little brother must have been using the computer, I didn't realize the handle had changed. God knows what kind of thread he started. . .

Anyway, for your questions-

It was actually May 18th, 2007. The weather in New England is rarely predictable. Only a week later it was above 80 degrees at the Class Meet.

I only ran the 800 once my junior year, as I was focusing more on the mile. I ran 4:20.22 for 1600 and 8:51 for 3000 indoors that year, and managed a winning 2:00.xx (I forget the tenths) in a rainy late season meet for a speed day.

I did the 16x300 once- that was enough, haha. Other workouts I see as noticeable are 10x1000 (1 min rest), 5x300, 5x200, 5x400 (the Triple Nickel), a 5k downhill ladder- 1200, 1000, 800, 600, 500, 400, 300, 200. A lot of workouts got made up as we went along- I'd start off with a few 600s, then do a pair of 300s, then do some 400s, then go back to 300s, etc etc. Sometimes I wouldn't know what I was going to do until I actually did it.

the thread you brother started was about...is it embarassing that you beat your brother's times as a sophomore that he was running as a junior?...but thats a nother thread.

Yeah the weather is really unpredictable because this last outdoor season it was unseasonably cold up until june when all of a sudden it got 90 degrees and 100% humidity which was unreal. The 10x1000 he mentioned is usually done within the first three weeks of the season. the 5000 down the mountain is the last real long workout usually done during spring vacation. the triple nickel and 16x300 are our finishing/fine tuning workouts. sometimes we do one the week before class meets and the other before states but lately the schedule has been such that we have done both of them before class meets.

On a side note, the length of my reply is grossly long and i would usually consider this unnecessary but since craigmac4h always tends to post extremely long i thought in honor of him i would post as long as he does.

one last thing being craig's coach when i first started i was 23 and the guy i coach with was 57 and we have the same approach....what works best for you may not work for someone else so lets find out what does and maximize your ability.