>I ran track for one year, and I had played basketball, so I
>wasn't exactly starting from scratch, but my coach was also my
>psychology teacher, so he played up the 'building your
>internal discipline to match your physical discipline' angle
>to convince me to try it. First meet I was great as a 'rabbit'
> during the first half of the race and then I finished dead
>last, LOL.

This is an absolutely brutal assignment that I have definitely given to 400m runners before. It was awful, and I regret nothing.

>I ended up running the 200, but I ran the 800 in
>practice to build for the 200. So in short, play it up as a
>strength thing, because in my mind, that is the hardest race.
> Anything beyond 800, you are running different, but 800 is
>really the threshold between sprinting and distance...

This would work really well, as our sprinters seem terminally un-prepared for even the strength necessary for 200m. Honestly, a lot of my initial post would have been unnecessary if our current sprint coaches were more interested in successfully building endurance for their own group.