How do you structure your training during HS XC season?

HS kids need more tempo than interval.

I would probably do a tempo on either Wed. or Thurs., depending on how much you care about the invitationals and league meets. Definitely make it a tempo, though. Two races a week will be plenty as far as fast stuff goes.

Rhinos wrote:

HS kids need more tempo than interval.

I agree.

We don't race Tuesday meets (except occasionally for some jv and inexperienced kids who need the racing). Each kid on my team only races 6-7 times per xc season.

Each race counts as a VO2 max workout, which counts as an interval workout. No need to add more, in my experience.

More threshold and reps, less racing.

However, if I were in your shoes and had to do what you're doing, I might do this:

S: Long run

M: Easy day with 4-8x200R

T: Race. Tempo for varsity or top 10. Race for everyone else. (Depends on your season goals, though. You might need to actually race these, depending on your AD.)

W: 12x200R

T: Day off or easy run

F: easy run+ 2x200R

S: Race

By the way, it took me a few years to get it to take, but my kids do their long runs on their own now, usually on Sundays.

We also do an early-morning session once a week so that they can have an afternoon free. That's usually when we do 200s. They meet at 6:00, do the run, eat, and then get to class by 7:50. I usually have 70+ kids there, so sometimes it gets a bit hectic.

Thursday: 12 mile run, followed by a 400 sub 60.....

Perhaps a different approach is needed.

As a young coach, I was presented with the same situation as you. I had no control over the dual meet schedule; like you, it was mandated by my conference and set on Tuesdays. What I did have control over were the invites.

So, with the exception of a week where we raced a less than strong team, I cancelled the invites.

That gave us 2 invites (one before the dual meets started), our 4 duals, and our qualifiers - a total of 10 races. The idea was to get our number of races down to roughly one a week; in reality, what this change really bought us was time to train.

And train we did. With a team that had only finished 3rd in their conference the year before, the kids responded by finishing 2nd in the state (largest division) by 11 points after not qualifying for a decade.

The point here is that a race is a race. It wasn't like we were doing some kind of magic workouts; our stuff was pretty basic. But not overracing those athletes - and allowing them time to train - gave them a chance to develop. We had time to do what we needed, they had time to recover.

Think about what you need to do for training and recovery... and find a way to do it. Be creative.

Thanks for all the responses.

Quarryman – did you have a hard time selling the kids on cutting back on invites? The previous coach had them racing invitationals every week. They enjoy it, but as we know it’s not beneficial.

Johnny Rotten, that looks good. Seems like a lot of rep work, do you start the season with that much or just during the racing season?

Thanks Again.

Colman wrote:

Thanks for all the responses.

Quarryman – did you have a hard time selling the kids on cutting back on invites? The previous coach had them racing invitationals every week. They enjoy it, but as we know it’s not beneficial.

Johnny Rotten, that looks good. Seems like a lot of rep work, do you start the season with that much or just during the racing season?

Thanks Again.

I have also cut back on the invites, plus, our league has gone to only 3 league meets, all the teams compete at every one. We have only 7 meets this season + up to 3 for the post season. In my situation, the kids are more than glad to give up their saturday meets. Most are involved in tons of activities and are academic stars as well. Giving them a saturday to do other stuff is just fine with them. I actually used to never be able to get my whole teams together for the weekend meets, but by having less of them, I can make the whole team commit to 2-3 per season. This has been much better for our team cohesiveness.

As far as the training goes. I agree with the tempo and reps philosophy. I have had lots of success with cruise intervals. I use them instead of straight tempo runs because it is very hot here when we start practice in august (often over 105) so the short rest allows the kids to grab some water. Also, it is a little easier for the kids to control their pace on CI workouts. We have a 1200m loop through a local arboretum with every 200 marked. A typical workout might be 5 x 1200 on a 6 min cycle. A boy who can run around 18 min might be hitting his 1200s in 4:30 or so. This gives him a little more rest than a normal CI ratio, but as I said, it is really hot. As the athletes get stronger, I drop them down to a 5:30 cycle or even a 5:00 cycle. Later in the season, we do some tempo runs on a 1000m loop with a small hill in it. By this time, they have the pace down pretty well and can run a solid tempo run, plus, by then the weather is a lot cooler. The same kid who was running 18 min early in the season might go 6k @ 3:45-3:50 per kilometer. If they can do this easily, I know they are ready to pop some big PRs in the post season.

Again, I agree! Cruise intervals are the most helpful workout, minute-for minute, that we do all season. I go by time: when the fast boys do 1000s, the fast girls and boys who race their pace so 800s, and so on. We rarely do more than 4:30 in any workbout.

As for reps: we start with strides a couple times per week for about 3 weeks and then start doing reps at the end of July, doing them until the end. Sometime we do slightly uphill, sometimes slightly downhill, but mostly on the track. I absolutely love them--told Marc Bloom in the fall that that was our favorite workout AS LONG AS YOU DO THEM AT THE APPROPRIATE PACE! I make my fast kids slow down so that they get the real importance of the session: what Wetmore calls "neuromuscular efficiency." My 1:52 half miler had to run them in 33-34, which looked like jogging to him.

If you read the chapter on reps in DRF, you'll really see what I mean. Daniels seems to put a lot of stock in their importance insofar as efficiency is concerned, and I agree with him. I can't do a ton to improve a VO2 max, but I can really help them be more efficient with what they've got. We do a lot of drills that help that, too. (Get the dvd "Building A Better Runner" which is extremely helpful in that respect.)

Colman,

You're getting lots of good advice here. I won't add much to it except to tell you to work on getting the dual meets dropped from your schedule. It may take time (as in not this year), but converse with other coaches in your league, put heads together, and find a way to get rid of them--they were put in there by people who didn't understand distance running. Play the it-cuts-travel-expense card. In our league, all the all-league selections and whatnot are based on a single league meet. Every so often, a deserving kid misses an all-league honor, but at least we're not hammering the kids with two races a week. And, honestly, I couldn't care less about league recognition, whether it's for the team or for the individual.

I will race my top kids five times, max, before state this year. Some other kids are newer and may need more races to stay interested or just to gain race experience, but the competitive core of your team needs training a lot more than they need racing. Remember that and your season will be better for it. If you're stuck with duals and invitationals for this year, be creative and rotate your core kids through the lineup so they're not racing all the time.

You’re correct; I am getting a lot of good advice. I’ve coached at a small college and this high school coaching is just so different. At the college level my bread and butter were interval 1000-1200’s and long continuous tempo runs 20min-40min @ varying paces.

But from what I’m hearing is shorter tempo (cruise intervals) and races take care of the VO2 max workouts for HS kids. This sounds more inline of what I’d like, I want to get the best out of the kids, but also want to keep them fresh.

One more question, do you guys do tempo runs over the summer? Starting around the second week of August I’d like to start 20min tempo runs once a week or would you recommend cruse intervals.

I’m back again; I keep looking at the calendar and trying to work this out.

When you sit kids out of a Tuesday league meet, do you still have them do a workout that day?

They aren’t allowed to wear watches in our races, but I could just make Tuesdays race into a fartlek or something. As unimportant as they are, I still don’t want to lose. I’ll have to look into this, but I think they also have a rule as to a minimum of league meets each kid must run. It’s like they’re trying to punish good coaches.

Looks like I’m up to 11 races before our state qualifier meet. One of them is a 1.5 mile race, that’s not too bad. We have 7 races in just league meets, CRAZY!!!

We are doing tempos already. However, the kids are under strict instructions to keep the runs comfortable. So, in reality, the "tempo" runs are probably more like "steady state" runs. We meet 3 times per week at 7:00 PM. It is still hot, but at least the bright sunshine has gone.

M: warm up + tempo (steady state)

W: Easy short run + drills + strides

Th: Long run

This last week was our first week back. My top guy did 4 miles tempo/steady in about 28 min. Wed was 4.6 miles easy with 3 laps of continuous drills and 3 laps of stride the straight, jog the turn. Thur was 6.6 easy. It was pretty hot, close to 100 degrees.

I found that my athletes were getting bored with just meeting for easy runs, so each day we meet will have some sort of stated purpose. It is hard to get most athletes to understand that the easy runs have a purpose. Like I said, they just seemed to get bored. I'm hoping that this schedule will help keep interest higher during the summer.

The days that we don't meet, the athletes are instructed to get as many easy miles on their legs as possible. For some of the younger kids, they might only do 2 more runs of 2-3 miles only. The older more experienced kids might get 5-7 more easy runs in during the week. One of my boys is staying the summer with his dad in a different town and has been doubling every day since the start of june. I am a bit worried, but he reports that he is feeling great. He went to an all comers track meet and ran one second slower than his mile PR then set a new PR in the 2 mile. He hasn't done any hard running at all and he is only running about 8 miles a day (4-4 or 5-3). One of my senior girls has been doubling most days since the beginning of june. She has been super inconsistant in the past, but she is finding that by running daily, and doubling on many of those days she likes running more and feels better doing it. Hopefully, these two kids will not blow their wads by early october and their success will inspire more of my athletes to take their summers more seriously.

It wasn't hard to sell the kids at all, especially when they started to race well. We just explained what we were trying to do; they got the idea. Remember, also, that school like York don't run a lot of invites, either. One unintentional advantage was that our kids were fresh when they did race; often, our opponents were tired coming into those meets, and when our athletes started beating up on some pretty good squads (our conference has produced 13 state championship teams in the last 30 or so years), it ended up providing a pretty quick confidence boost that we might not have ordinarily received from a large invite. It wasn't part of the plan, but it didn't hurt.

I would be cautious about thinking that one training type (I.E. cruise intervals) is best. Important, absolutely; I also feel they are productive. But dropping meets would allow you to work on a number of different areas, and in the process make your kids more complete athletes.

It's interesting to see the regional views on training. Some areas seem overwhelmingly Daniels influenced; others seem to live on Paavo stuff. Most of our successful state meet coaches (including NTN teams) are heavily influenced by Vigil. Different roads to Rome.

We went to NTN this past year and did a training program heavily influenced by Daniels. Paavo drives me crazy!

Most of my kids other than the real horses can't do many real tempo runs--it's just too mentally taxing for them. That's why we do a lot of cruise intervals, which break the work into manageable bits. If I had my druthers, we'd do a couple of real tempos per month, but with high school runners sometimes that's just not possible.

I'm fortunate in two respects with my schedule: A) we don't run in the local meets and don't have to do league meets and B) my AD gives me an enormous amount of room to breathe. (We're the only team at the school that has won State recently, and that seems to buy me said room...)

You've gotten some really perceptive advice here--clearly from people who have coached high schoolers (rather than collegiates or club teams). I'm interested in how your season goes. I know what works for us and know that it's been very successful, but I'm always looking to augment what we do. This year, for example, one of my assistants it taking over our entire strength and injury prevention program, while the other is taking over our whole running mechanics program. That way, they can really be expert in one area and put a lot into that one area--and I don't have to worry about it and can worry about the other stuff!

Colman wrote:

I’m back again; I keep looking at the calendar and trying to work this out.

When you sit kids out of a Tuesday league meet, do you still have them do a workout that day?

They aren’t allowed to wear watches in our races, but I could just make Tuesdays race into a fartlek or something. As unimportant as they are, I still don’t want to lose. I’ll have to look into this, but I think they also have a rule as to a minimum of league meets each kid must run. It’s like they’re trying to punish good coaches.

Looks like I’m up to 11 races before our state qualifier meet. One of them is a 1.5 mile race, that’s not too bad. We have 7 races in just league meets, CRAZY!!!

We do start running thresholds (tempo) during the summer. It does keep the kids from lapsing into plodding mode and helps keep them in touch with a little bit of speed.

If we sit a kid out of a meet, yes, he/she does a workout that day--and usually a quality workout, just not a race. Doing this helps to keep everyone on the same cycle of quality/recovery days and thus makes management of the season a lot easier. I'm guessing that's what you were getting at.

No problem about not wearing watches in a race--in fact, it can help them get better in tune with their bodies. All you need is someone giving a split at the first mile (or K) and have the kids adjust from there, if necessary.

A rule stating a minimum number of league meets for individuals??? Wow, what if a kid is hurt? Outta luck?

Here's my reflection on "I still don't want to lose." We've taken state the same year we've finished third in our league meet. You get over the wanting to win all the little stuff real quickly when you see how much more ready your kids are for state when they aren't physically or mentally overraced. That said, we've brought along a pretty solid program and, frankly, our second team could win a whole lot of meets. Sometimes, it's fun to turn them loose and let them win a meet. And, it's huge for those kids to step on the course in a varsity race and bring home a trophy. You may not be in that position starting out, but try to cultivate that. If young kids know they'll get to run some varsity even if they're 11th on the team, that tends to keep them a lot more motivated and tends to keep them coming back out the next year.

Really good thread.

Bump for more.