Run-Down Forums

[Distance_Guru]

In my experience distance runners being complaicent does happen a lot, particularly on the level that I have the most expereince, smaller colleges. Athletes in these schools tend to be lumped into three catagories, (two main ones and one small) the smallest is the blue chip kids, these at this level particularly tend to be foreign athletes or athletes that didn't have the grades to go to a big school. The other two groups are the classic under talented overacheivers and the over talented under achievers.
The less talented kids usually for guys are kids that ran just over 10 mins in the two mile and just under 4:40 for 1600 and run in college because they love it, and they have something to prove. The other group the underachievers generally run in college because they are to good not to and the coach is giving them scholarship money to run. After all a talented runner can underacheive and still score points at meets, even if he isn't running up to his potential. As for myself give me 7 or so guys that were 10:00-10:15 in the 3200 on typical high school training (25-35 mpw), that are willing to work hard to improve and I'll give you a x-c team and distance squad that will be competitive with 90+% of the teams below D1.

[Distance_Guru]

I think a bigger problem than overtraining with American distance running is over racing. With cross country, indoor and outdoor track, college runners in the US are racing for at least 8 months of the year under most systems (xc Sep-Nov, ID Jan-March and OD March-June). And the only thing worse than having all these seasons is not, I ran at a school that only had x-c and after our last race we pretty much sat around and got fat from Dec-April, (of coarse we had nobody to blame but ourselves). With all these seasons it is really difficult for a coach to balance the school and the boosters demands for weekly results with the athletes need for uninterupted training. Some people will advocate training through races, which is something a disagree with (although something that I admit to doing on occasion), in my opinion when you race you are racing to race your best, when you train you train to race, you should not use a race to train. Racing is very rough on the body, and it takes time to recover from which eats in to training time. Unfortunatly many coaches are forced to race their best runners every week by the athletic department and the boosters. Although some coaches, most notably Wettmore at CU has been able to race his athletes sparingly and still keep up support from the athletic department and the boosters, of coarse producing cross country nationals titles both individually and as a team on both the mens and womens sides in the span of four years will pretty much shut up any crittics you have.

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Time is the fire in which we burn

[Conway]

My question is this: Is every race critical ?? And what is wrong with training through certain races ??? Other athletes do it - sprinters, hurdlers, shot putters, etc ..

And do distance runners look at the idea of "peaking" at all ??? I say that half in jest as I know that there are those that do ... But is it something that is done in general ?? The reason I ask is becasue it seems as if most American distance runners are always out there "hoping" to make a PR today ... As opposed to aiming for PRs ... Alan Webb was the first I had seen in along time last year to actually focus on setting a PR - wish he had waited a few weeks to do so ...

[Distance_Guru]

Is every race critical? It depends on who you ask and also who you're dealing with. If you ask me, after high school good distance runners should only run in races that are critical, with one exception. That exception is freshmen. I think most freshmen need to get some college races under their belt so that they can make the mental transition from high school runner running in college to full blown college runner. Now obviously there are exceptions Alan Webb being an example of this. Most freshman find themselves facing runners with PR's so much faster than theirs that they need to get in a couple of races to help them realize that they do belong at this level. With a runner like Webb, that isn't a problem.
But after a runner is comfortable at the level of compotition then I think that each race should have a purpose, in cross country races should be positioned so that you see the teams that you wish to see in order to gauge your team agaist theirs and hopefully improve your national rankings. But this can be done in two regular season races, follow that up with a conference, regional, and national championship and you have a season in which every race counted.
For track, I think distance runners need to be raced only in order to hit a quailifying time or try for a personal best. The rest of the time should be spent training in order to prepare to accomplish that in a race. Running races without the intention of hitting a PR or running a quailifying time for a good athlete is sinceless. The reason it is sinceless is that training is the only way to get faster (legally) and races wheather they are important or not take time away from training and therefore should only be done when the race is important.
That said, if you're coaching athletes with no chance of getting to nationals or even coming close to quailifying then race the heck out of them. Let them have fun. They won't run PR's as fast as they could if they were geared to just run the races that counted and focused on running as well as possible in them, but if they aren't going to be really fast anyway I don't think it really matters.
Coaching distance runners is like dealing with horses, if you've got Man O' War in you're stable then you're not going to saddle him up and ride him in any old race. You're going to take him and train him to win the three triple crown races and to heck with every other race out there that year. However if you've just got a plow horse named Spot then why not let him have fun and run in every race for miles around and if he gets last in every one hey, that's no big deal on his best day he probably would have only been next to last anyway.

The problem is there are coaches out there that are treating Man O War, like he was Spot.

[Conway]

"See Spot Run!!!" ... I thought that the overracing (that and Title IX) was behind the demise of the dual meet season in collegiate track and field ???

Now here is a thought (and don;'t shoot me) why not get rid of the cross country season ... Use it as a training season for distance runners to get ready for track, but forget the team competition and such ... Or is that too simple ??

[Distance_Guru]

You might be on the right track but wrong sport. A possible solution would be to elliminate indoor. Cross country training is the kind of training that an athlete would be doing for track at that time of year wheather there was a track season or not. And with the spacing of cross country, indoor and outdoor it is very easy to have a peak of fitness for x-c and then drop down and come back up again for outdoor. Indoor is in a bad spot in more ways than one. First off it would be exceedingly difficult (more like impossible) to peak for indoor and then hold that peak all the way through for outdoor and they are spaced to close together to try to rest and start a full cycle over again. Also indoor tracks, as we all know, are short and have tight turns, a combination of factors that lead to a lot of injuries, particularly to distance runners that have to run more laps per repeat than shorter disatance athletes. So if you're going to get rid of one get rid of indoor, of coarse that really only applies to distance runners since from what I understand indoors is very helpful to sprinters, jumpers, throwers ect.

Besides I absolutly love x-c, with the cloes knit since of team unity it builds. That and there is nothing like watching 200 of the best runners wheather they're 800 runners, milers, steeple chasers, or 5k-10k guys, all getting after it on the same coarse to see who the best really is, it's a beautiful thing!

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Time is the fire in which we burn

[Dan]

Keep in mind that Indoor was probably not set up with the US school system in mind. With the International schedule with most of Outdoor taking place during late spring and summer, the three seasons are actually balanced out quite nicely.

My impression is that most people in the US school system that run cross country and Outdoor either skip Indoor or run it very sparingly (a qualifier and a championship meet or two). The latter group may well start their Outdoor season later as a result. At any rate, I don't see overracing as much of an issue. Many collegiate schedules are actually too sparse, not over crowded...

Dan

[Distance_Guru]

I think that you get teams that fall on both sides, some not racing enough some racing to much. And at least from where I'm sitting it seems that underracing would happen less often and be less detremental than overracing. Here's why, if an athlete is gunning for say, indoor quailifying, and the coach has deceided that he wants to limit the number of races this athlete will run, he will more than likely pick a quailifying race that's located two or so weeks before the final day to quailify. If the athlete quailifies then everything is good. If he doesn't the coach simply enters him into a last chance quailifier. This allows the athlete to quailify for nationals and get in plenty of quaility training because the coach to limited the number of races that he ran. On the other hand if the athlete quailifies right off the bat and then runs five more races before the championship his training will be of a lower quaility and his legs will be less fresh for the major meet. Now this applies mainly for races, 3000m and above. These races really tear you down and require rest to recover from. Races of 800-1 mile in distace can be run more often, however milers should probably not run the mile every race but mix in some 800's for variety and recovery.

_________________
Time is the fire in which we burn

[Conway]

Question: Sprinters and hurdlers need competition to get sharp and stay there ... It is the rare speed event athlete that can sit out without raicng and then "boom" go to a high quality competition and do well ... And it seems to me that middle distance racers fall into that category as well ...

While I understand the need to under race in the marathon and ultras, is it really that big a deal for the steeple, 5K & 10K guys ??? I always looked at competition as a shrpener, not a downer ...

[Distance_Guru]

A good rule of thumb is that there is a minimum of three days recovery time for any distance race(at full effort anyway) and increasing a day for every mile or fraction of a race, before you're recoved fully and can train at 100% again. In other words you need three days after a mile, 4 days after a 5k and 7 days after a 10k of scaled back training. That loss of training causes a loss in performance by the end of the season that is far larger than any gains that might have been made from any sharpening effect of racing. Also after a long season many runners loose the excitement for racing that cames when you're fresh, if you've been racing every week for six weeks or more and the athletes performances have leveled off, they may get board, or discouraged.

_________________
Time is the fire in which we burn

[Hammer]

I love XC as well DG but it does cause alot of problems. I think alot of coaches try to peak 3 times in a season (XC, Indoor, and outdoor) when a lot of ??experts??? believe that only 1 peak can be achieved in a year. This leads to a large amount of interval training in XC. (I am agreeing with what DG stated in another post)

XC Coaches need to stress the long hard run.

[Distance_Guru]

Any coach that tries to peak his athletes three times a year is either making a mistake, isn't trying to get his athletes as fast as they can possibly be or knows something that I don't about training distance runners. From everything that I've read it is really tough to peak for all three. Since these seasons are back to back to back. It is pretty tough for anyone to run optimally in all three unless racing is minimized in at least one if not more of these seasons. Like Hammer said during x-c long hard running should be stressed. Scale back the mileage and increase the quaility a little late and you should be ready to run well in the championship x-c season. With the distances involved with cross country I'm not an advocate of racing very often during this season regaurdless of wheather you're a cross country specialist or a 800 runner that is just doing x-c for conditioning. With indoor and outdoor I feel that the athlete should limit racing during the indoor season and focus on training, slowly increasing the intensity of training from what it was during x-c. The only reason an athlete should really try to peak for indoor is if their is a special reason, like winning a championship that he wouldn't have a chance to do outdoor or if the runner is in college and is planning to red shirt outdoor track or something like that. Otherwise the training during indoor should be at the pre-compotion phase, with only a two or at most three week easeing of training for the major races of the season. Only for outdoor should the competitive and a full finishing taper be used. Also outdoor is the season in which the most races can be done.

At least this is in my ever humble opinion how a year should be structured.

_________________
Time is the fire in which we burn

[Conway]

Just curious .. The indoor season really seems to be more of an east coast thing .. almost no indoor meets here on the wests coast ... And not many in the interior of the US .. So why bother with it at all ?? Who is it important to ??? Seems like that is an area where the distance runners can make more optimal use of their training time ... And like DG says, work the long hard run during cross country ... This would then put our distance runners with one peak - sometime during the outdoor season ... Would this not put us in a better position to compete internationally ???

[Hammer]

In the American HS and College system, a year really begins in June or July and ends in May or June. With that in mind I think that any coach who attempts to peak runners in November and then again in May is an idiot. Those runners lose out on the type of training they should be doing during the XC season and they do not progress at the same rate as European Jr. runners.

Besides there are a lot of HS coaches who do not know what they are doing so their peaking system is flawed and they don't help their runners that much any way.

[Conway]

I agree about most high school coaches .. I go to lots of meets every year and find veyr poor coaching at most of the high school meets I attend ..

I'm surprised that there aren't more "diamonds in the rough" given the level of coaching most kids get in high school .. I wonder if a majority of these kids go on to continue competing or if they get discouraged and quit ???