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>SPORTS COACHED:
XC and Track. I'm only an assistant for XC, so I mostly just do what I'm told there. But in indoor and outdoor, I'm a head coach and am specifically responsible for 800m runners on up to 3200m.
>AGE/GENDER COACHED:
High school boys.
>COACHING STYLE / STRATEGY:
There's not a lot of events in high school that benefit from a true distance approach, where I'd be more interested in supplementing plain old volume with real eyeballs-in-back-of-head tempo runs into the spring. So on a team where we're constantly stretching for more 800m runners (to fill out a relay), I tend to stretch most of our guys downward instead of upwards and the result is that my guys start with a substantial gap between strength work and speed work that grows a lot bigger by the end of the year.
So, because we can't count on all of our runners having a strong distance base coming from XC, this past year (my first one responsible for all of this nonsense) we more or less devoted December and January to workouts that supplemented the base of guys who ran XC and kind of bootlegged one for guys who didn't. I sent them out for long distance runs on Tuesdays and Thursdays, usually 45 minutes or an hour of long, slow distance after a 15 minute warmup. Convincing some of our better runners that this was base building and recovery and so should be done *slow* was a tough sell at first, as they're high schoolers and kind of preferred all fast, all the time.
To scratch that itch, any regimented workout we did for those months was basically base-building in disguise. My favorite was one called "Who Moved My Cheese," after that stupid book I was forced to read in one of my first jobs after college. That one was 1 minute hard, 1 minute jog, 2 minutes hard, 2 minutes jog, 3 minutes hard, 3 minutes jog - repeated 3 or 4 times, depending on what else we had going that week. The kids hated it, but I was typically pretty pleased with the results, particularly if I could reign in our better runners and convince them to form a 3-5 man pack on the "hard" portions.
In any case, winter was all long slow runs and long repeat with short rest or tempo runs. Basically, base-building without much regard for 800m and below speed. Results were pretty much where I expected - the kids built some good strength and turned in:
-good early-season results in 1600/3200
-an ability to double and triple in meets when needed
-mediocre but well-paced results in 800m
This year, primarily due to the personnel I was training, we didn't really start adding serious speed work until mid-April. Stuff like "Who Moved My Cheese?" stuck around all season, usually for the first hard, paced workout of the week on Monday. Tuesdays and Thursdays stayed long, slow distance days - but we made sure they did some hard 30-50m strides afterwards, on a hill when possible. On Wednesdays, we'd gradually introduce some speed. I had one that I adapted from college that I called "Electric Teeth" (I liked naming workouts so I could keep track of which ones they remembered) which required real pop, but kept rest really minimal:
Two sets of 7x200m with 30 seconds rest @ 30 seconds or below with fifteen minutes between sets.
We also did a lot of "broken" 400m workouts, where the kids do 300m at around 45-48, rest 30 seconds, then sprint the last 100m. We'd usually only do a handful of those, around 4, with five full minutes in between. I adapted that a couple times for 700m + 100m, but those didn't really take. These started showing up mid-April and were kind of their first introduction to hard intervals with serious rest.
Finally, when it was time to add speed we kept it very fast and very short. 150s and 200s. Up to three minutes rest. The only time we went above that was for the purpose of trying to develop some racing tactics - which for my fairly inexperienced batch boiled down to "remember that you are RACING and not just running a distance." Most were kind of flops, but one worked. I called it "I'm your Huckleberry" after Val Kilmer in "Tombstone." What we did there was have the kids do some 400m intervals but pick one or two of them to start at 300. After the 400m pack got a good distance past the Huckleberries, say 75m, I'd send them and tell them to catch whoever they could.
They liked that one.
In any case, I was working with such a small batch that a lot of my plans had to be altered day-of because, with runners this inexperienced, having a full group (cobbled together) was more important than a precisely tailored workout. All told, our seasonal results were on the good side of "ok." Most of my guys had PR'd by the end of the season, usually substantially:
a)sophomore miler drops from 5:03 to 4:57
b)senior miler drops from 4:55 to 4:46
c)junior half-miler drops from 2:03 to 1:57
d)newcomer drops over 30 seconds in 2 mile from April to May
d)junior half-miler drops from 2:19 to 2:04
We're not looking at a whole lot of graduation losses, so the outlook is pretty sunny next year. But it's high schoolers so you can't really count on a linear progression when they could just as easily discover that girls > track, an inequality I wont argue with except to point out that they aren't mutually exclusive at 17. One thing I'd like to do is make sure we have better retention from cross country so I'm working with a larger group of kids. Distance running is one of those things where volume really helps, and our conference is so small that picking up back-end scorers in the 3200 should be easy.
Also, I'd rather like to send a 4x800m to Penn Relays next season. Qualifying time is 8:14 for small schools, and we should have 2 legs who can bring us through in under 4:00 total. That means improving on the one thing I rather conclusively failed on this season: stretching 400m runners to 800m runners. It's just so tough getting them to buy into the event, much less trying to get them strength on the fly when they don't run cross country. The above-mentioned sophomore miler ran 2:12 next year, so if he stays healthy then we can coax him down to somewhere in the 2:05 neighborhood. But that's still only 3/4s of a team.
That's strategy though. I'm still figuring out what my coaching style is. I'm not a particularly loud person and my general attitude towards track is that, since there's such a clear line between work & success (more than other sports, I think) that it's best to let kids determine their own level of involvement. In short: it's their team. If they can't get appropriately amped for a big conference meet or running in front of 25,000 people at Penn, then I actually don't think the coach is the best qualified to create that attitude.
I mean, I could recite the lyrics to "For those about to rock" in German and get them into a frenzied psychosis. But why? I don't know. I got a fair amount of static on this topic from my co-head coach and one of our assistants. But the way I figure it, I'm there to push the right training buttons to avoid injury and promote fast-ness and then to make the right entries on meet day that give us a chance to win. It's not really about me, so ideally, I just make sure things run smoothly. ______________________________
"Walleye, a lot of things are going to go wrong in your life that technically aren't your fault. Always remember that this doesn't make you any less of an idiot"
--Walleye's Dad
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