Maximum Improvement for Senior Year

sub 4:30 and sub 9:45

Coaching high school especially with newer runners big jumps happen a lot. Biggest jump I remember locally was a kid improving 3-4min in XC going sub 16 i think to win states.

I’m sure he’d be thrilled with those times.

sorry for not finding the 16 year old thread.

The biggest improvement that I have had was when a young 7th grade kid I coach went from 4:48 1500m and 10:40 3k cross country to the following year in 8th grade running 1:57 800m/4:03 1500m/12:37 4k XC as a 14 year old. Big talent but decided that he wanted to be good so started running 40 miles per week (as a 15 year old he now runs around 50 miles per week with 1 day off)

If your athlete has 53 second 400m speed building his engine will be the key. I think your athlete could easily break 4:30 for the mile and possible 4:25 if he stays consistent and injury free.

Good luck!

Thanks for the input. His workouts are still going really well.

He's been doing a lot of tempo effort on a section of our cc course the last couple of weeks. We have a very slow (lots of tight turns and loose gravel) 1200m section of the course that can be run as a loop with lots of opportunities for kids to cut across and catch back up if they get dropped. We've been running Summer of Malmo style where each group has a pace that works for almost everyone in the group and kids that fall back can catch up by cutting across and maybe cutting off 200m while they catch their breath.

He's been locking in very comfortably at right around 4 min / kilometer or slightly faster for 7200-8400m. The only other hard session he did was 7 x 3 min @ CV effort on the track with 1 min recoveries. He averaged close to 870m for each of the "ons", so just under 5:30 pace. Said it felt pretty controlled.

56 miles last week.

Hard to say the absolute biggest, but I've seen a guy go from 10:07 as a junior to 9:24...gotta be up there. A number of other guys with ~30 second improvements (9:24 to 8:53, 9:37 to 9:08, 9:56 to 9:30).

Edit: adding their mile times for context: the 9:24 guy went from 4:39 to 4:22, the 8:53 from 4:22 to 4:11, the 9:08 from 4:26 to 4:15, and the 9:30 from 4:42 to 4:33. So as you can see, big jumps in the 3200 usually are not accompanied by quite as big a jump in the shorter distance (largely because big jumps come from aerobic development).

I had a kid this past year go from 4:53/10:48 as a sophomore to 4:27/9:36 as a junior. It's been nothing but a steady diet of consistency. Mostly tempos, 200s at mile rp, and the occasional other multi-paced workout or races.

Dale Fleet, father of Mac Fleet, went from 10:0X to 9:10 after one summer of ~800 miles in 9 weeks back in the early 1970s. He also had very strong motivation to run those times: escape family household fighting. Some suspect it was similar reason why Gerry Lindgren ran all those crazy miles back in the day. There were only two reasons, back then, you work your absolute tail off to put in that kind of mileage in your formative years: you're escaping the harsh reality of a broken home or you've gone mad.

It's a cool story:

voiceofsandiego.org

Another Father-Son Story

Voice of San Diego

The father-son story of the year in San Diego sports is Tony Gwynn coming home to play for the Padres, where his father of the same name established a Hall-of-Fame baseball career and has a statue outside the right field fenc...

Link:voiceofsandiego.org/2009/06/08/another...

Correction: Dale went from 10:0x to 8:53 from junior to senior year. The 800 miles over the summer was the primary reason for his success.

My daughter went from 11:45 to 10:32.

took over a program and one boy went from 6th at league finals as a junior before i started coaching him, to 12th at FootLocker his senior season. girl on that team went from 5th at league finals to 25th at FootLocker.

another kid went from 15:24 at mt sac one season to 14:34 the next 🤣

coached a boy for a few months of his sr track season, went from 5th in the 3200 at CIF Prelims year before to 4th at State

my bad, missed the "senior year" qualifier, so remove the mt sac kid

From 63/2:27/5:20/12:06 to 59/2:16/5:02/10:48 in one year, junior to senior (female)