It is "nonsense" to say that a bad coach just doesn't have a runner able to do 4 sub 5 miles in a workout? The fact is that you don't get anywhere near that without a great deal of training. Just take a look at results by school, whether xc or track, and you'll see that despite the fact that "talent" is more or less randomly distributed around the country by population, there are certain schools in every region that do a lot better, and a very few schools that have girls running 4:50 or better in races. To do 4 in one workout under 5 is astounding and requires a combination of talent and a tremendous coach. How many coaches in the entire country have ever prepared girls to do a workout like this? I am going to guess that it is no more than a dozen, factoring in the 5 1500 and 10k athletes Kellogg mentions, plus Patti Sue Plumer, Mary Decker, and several more. Sure, some of these coaches go crazy when they get a super-talented girl and they overwork them like here. But 99% of the coaches in the country could not get a girl like this anywhere close to this level. And she was able to do 2 4:50 1600s back to back here in the time trial with no rest. As far as assessing this performance, it was presumably done in Texas in mid-May, which means that it is an even greater performance than it seems, because weather for a 3200m at this time of year in Texas is not exactly perfect. Put her in a competitive race in ideal conditions up north and she would have been ready to break Cain's 2M record of 9:38. I know this because I am at a similar latitude and it is a lot slower to run even in the evening.
LateRunnerPhil wrote:
zxvczxcv wrote:
No bad coach has a high school girl able to run four sub 5 repeats in a workout. Bad coaches have girls running six or over in races. The direction of times was not optimal but this is a girl ready to go sub 10 for 2M.
That's nonsense. Most coaches don't have their girls running multiple sub 5-min miles in training on a partially soft surface because they don't have such talented girls (top 0.01% or so).
Bad coaches in charge of super-talents frequently get them injured, and limit their room for further improvements if they overwork them in HS.
This workout is not a workout, it's a race. 4x1 Mile at around 3k pace is a race-like effort. If that was the goal, why not just run a TT and get a PR? Lots of people here say this workout signals sub 15:30 shape, why not run a 5k in 15:30 and get a similarly hard effort but with a new PR to show? Both would work the VO2MAX, but the difference on paper is a great race result instead of 4 somewhat fast miles.