Change

Posted on January 22, 2010 by CoachJay

If you’re a fan of the sport or a student of the sport or a connoisseur of the sport, then you’ll want to read Dathan Ritzenhein’s blog. It’s honest and unlike many blogs from endurance athletes, he tells you what he’s doing and why he’s doing it, giving his blog a level of candor that is missing from most other athlete’s blogs.

In this post he shares snapshots of his high school training, his collegiate training, his post collegiate training with Brad Hudson and his current training with Alberto Salazar. On one hand it’s only a week of training from each coach, but on the other hand it’s a fantastic longitudinal look at the training that helped a kid from Rockford earn a medal at the 2001 IAAF World Junior Cross Country Championships (the winner was a guy named named Bekele) and then run under 13 minutes and become the American Record Holder at 5,000m.

I want to share the seven days from his University of Colorado training log.

College- Spring of 2004 after 27:38 10k debut in Boulder Colorado 5,400 ft

Monday: AM 7 miles easy on bike path. PM 7 miles easy on grass field. Strides and stadium bounding.

Tuesday: PM 3 mile warm-up and strides. 20 x 400m in 64 with 200m jog. 3 mile cool down. Lift

Wednesday: PM 15 miles at cinder trail at 5:45 pace

Thursday: AM 7 miles easy on trail. PM 7 miles easy on bike path. Strides and stadium Bounding.

Friday: PM 3 mile warm-up and strides. 10k threshold on the track at 4:50 pace. 3 mile cool down.

Saturday: 10 miles easy on trails.

Sunday: 17 miles on Magnolia Road at 8600ft. 5:50 Average.

If you’ve read Running with the Buffaloes, then there is nothing that surprising here in terms of the rhythm of the week. Workout Tuesday, Medium Distance Wed, Workout Friday, Long Run Sunday (though that’s a damn good day on Mags – 5:50 is way, way better than this guy). The thing that stuck out to me like a blinking light was Thursday’s “Strides and stadium Bounding.” Why? Because in the five years I ran at CU we didn’t bound stadium stairs and in most of the six years I coached there stadium bounding never happened, yet for a short time “Stadium Bounding” was part of the recipe. After reading that my first though was, “Right, Wetmore did have them do that for a year or two” and the second thought was, “I wonder if he went back and read Lydiard and that’s why he put that in?” Lydiard has a hill bounding phase in his training plan and having athletes bound up the steps of Folsom field is a great way to mimic Lydiard’s intent.

More importantly, reading Dathan’s blog reminded me of the first run I remember with Mark, with me in the capacity as assistant coach. We were running on a single track trail in Grand Lake Colorado. We running in the month of August, during the pre-season cross country camp. The previous fall his men’s team had won the 2001 team title, making him the first coach to win both men’s and women’s team titles in DI cross country as well as men’s and women’s individual titles (Martin Smith has accomplished a similar, but not identical, feat with woman at UVA and men at Wisconsin).

Mark spent the entire run discussing things he planned to change for the upcoming season.

I’ll repeat.

Mark spent the entire run discussing things he planned to change for the upcoming season.

That run had a tremendous impact on me as a coach; maybe it was the best coaching lesson Mark ever gave me? Probably not, but the others are likely stuck in my unconscious, where as this one is front and center in my frontal lobe. I was a great run, a fun run.

Change is not only good, it’s necessary.

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  • Chris Puppione

    Nice bit here, Jay.

    I can honestly say that, while there are elements of training I look to touch on each season or even benchmark sessions that I enjoy doing with athletes year in and year out, I have never had a season replicate another. In fact, I like your story about Mark here because I have felt that when you have had success as a coach, that is when you should be the most intent on scrutinizing and re-evaluating your methods.

    There is a saying that goes something like “what got you here won't get you there.” I like that. If you want to progress, even after success–no, actually–ESPECIALLY after success, change is absolutely necessary.

    Thanks for your thoughts as always.

  • CoachMK

    Jay,
    I'm curious to know how much of the training changes did Mark actually implement? Personally, I know when I run I often think of changes I would/could make in the future, but they don't always happen for a variety of reasons, i.e. injury, team dynamics, cost, etc.

    Also, any chance of sharing some of Mark's thoughts from that run?

  • http://www.veganoutreach.org/ Matt

    Thanks for this post, Jay — really great stuff!

  • phj

    I would also like to know what Mark's thoughts were and if he actually implemented them?

    I would also like to say that Coach Jay Johnson and Coach Mark Wetmore have always been so open to me about their training and advice. I really appreciate what these two guys are to our sport.

  • http://www.veganoutreach.org/ Matt

    Regarding an earlier discussion here, I note, in the comment section of the Different training thread, Ritz says:
    “And lastly about the differences between Alberto and Brad’s training, I have found that I respond to a change in stimulus better than a lot of the same thing. With Alberto’s training I may not be in top form at one point of the season but I also have a much higher peak. When the peak races come I am ready. With Brad I was always in pretty good shape but didn’t see huge changes through the season. I think the change from marathon work is what helped me run so fast this summer and fall because I had had similar results for four years and the change in stimulus is what made me have a huge peak in August through October.”

  • http://coachjayjohnson.com CoachJay

    I think it's fitting that the 200th comment I'll make on this blog to say thank you to Chris for sharing the “What got you here won't get you there.”

    Also, to the readership, the comment that “ESPECIALLY after success, change is absolutely necessary” is a great thought for us all.

    But just to add something, today on a run with Brent I reminded him that if we did the same workout 3-4 times over a given period (I'm thinking 16-20 weeks, but I didn't tell him that) that you don't necessarily have to run the workout faster every time to gain fitness and to be improving as an athlete. I share this because I don't want people to confuse the micro and the macro on this topic of Change. If you change a few of the small elements of training – you add a new workout (taking out some other workout) or you add some new ancillary work, be it general strength, plyometric, preventive, etc. – you impact the Macro. My guess is that the best coaches and the best programs keep 90%-95% constant from year to year, both in terms of the actual workouts but more importantly the mentality and approach to training and when they have a successful year they go back and analyze what could be tweaked or what they think science or empirical data supports as the new thing to add*. So change is actually this small, micro tweak in the “recipe,” yet that small tweak is significant enough to have an impact on the program and that, IMHO, counts as a Macro change. I just want to make sure the coaches and athletes reading this who are successful don't blindly go back and try to completely start from scratch**.

    I don't mean to sound like a know it all and every time I write something with the tone of “here is what you need to do” or “here is how things work in running” I worry that I'm setting myself (and the athletes?) up for a huge lesson to be taught by the running gods. But in the spirit of candor and in the spirit of learning, I want to share that with Brent and Renee all I've been doing is looking at what we did that last 16 and 10 weeks, respectively, and what we need to change moving forward. For both there was/is a rough plan from now through Europe, but I'm going back to try to tweak it to maximize our time and the energy they'll put into training. That's the take home message from this post. Even when you're working hard – and Dathan has been working hard for a decade – you still need to work smarter and be willing simply say, “I used to think ______ was really important, but now I think I need to focus a bit more on _____ and ______ .”

    Thanks Chris!

    *My guess is that the most successful coaches also take something out because most successful coaches are already asking a ton from the athletes in terms of time and attention; adding more on top of a lot is not the best idea…though with professional, American distance runners who think 2.5 hours is a long practice I'm constantly adding and not taking away because we need to hours worked in Boulder to be on par with the hours worked in Iten and Addis Ababa

    **How do you know you should change anything and that what you really need to do is keep following your recipe for another 3 months or 6 months or 12 months before you evaluate it? I have this hypothesis with CU males who run for Mark. If they did every thing he told them VERBATIM their first two years, then each subsequent semester (i.e. fall/xc and then spring/indoor and outdoor) they change one small thing (i.e. I will run Wednesday one notch slower, even if that means I'll be out the back) I think they would run better. BUT!!! the only way to get that level of self knowledge as a runner and the only way to truly understand a training system is to do it EXACTLY as intended, exactly as prescirbed . If a freshman decides they can't hang on Wednesday and runs slow, why should we trust their analysis and feel for the workout? And let's be honest. In 1994 none of us, with the exception of Tommy, had anyone telling us we were running too hard or doing the wrong thing. No chat boards and very little training information combined with blind devotion to idea that if we ran hard we'd race fast. But the current college coach has kids who've gone to the internet or gone to a summer running camp and think they should be “running at my threshold for 6k then do some repeat 1ks at Vo2max.” Wrong kid. Choose your college coach wisely, then turn off your brain and do what they say for a couple of years, then turn your brain back on to get your one idea, then turn it off again and go train with that one idea in mind.

  • Chris Puppione

    Jay,

    I really like the double-star section (**) of your post above. I am continually amazed by the impact the internet has had on our sport. I remember here in California when I was in high school, we were dying to get our copies of California Track and Running News so that we could see in its flimsy thin paper pages the race results from two months prior. State rankings came on ditto sheets in mailings to the high school coaches, and often, by the time they arrived, other teams had made a splash and once highly-touted teams spiraled into anonymity.

    And those were just results! As far as I knew, everyone trained like we did, or they just didn't train at all. I certainly didn't care what workouts other people ran because it didn't pay to want to know–how would you ever find out? I just did what I was told–not because I am the most compliant person in the world–on the contrary, I am impossible. But I did it because I felt like my coach was a good man and hey, why would he tell me to do something that would not help?

    I stroll down Amnesia Lane here because I do have a point–it's somewhere around here, I swear it….AH! Ok–my point–commitment to a methodology, to a coach, to a system, to a theory, to a myth–whatever it is–commitment to it is paramount. At least in the beginning, as you pointed out.

    Look, we can never really know if all that we do works for us or not–the variables are tremendous in number and degree. However, we will certainly not know if our approach is worthwhile if we do not have athletes that will buy in and follow it completely. It is essentially an act of faith, right? I read that somewhere.

    And just like with faith, it is or duty to question it. If what we believe is true, it will withstand the tests and the trials and still ring true in the end. But before we poke at it with a stick and scrunch up our noses and turn away from an idea, an approach, a method, or a man–we have to take a chance and go all the way. It is the only way we can truly “measure them a measure” and so on…

    Coach John Wooden said, “If you don't have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?” Two things here–one, you have to do it right, which means do right by your training or approach. Give it a shot. Because if you don't–and here is two–when you try to do it over, you will only be repeating the same mistake, which will be the mistake of not committing completely to your endeavor. Once you have committed, and either succeeded or failed, then you must question and ultimately change.

    But it all goes back to faith–having enough to commit, and having enough to change.

    This is a favorite quote of mine that sums this up, I think:

    “When you get to the end of all the light you know and it's time to step into the darkness of the unknown, faith is knowing that one of two things shall happen: either you will be given something solid to stand on, or you will be taught how to fly.”

  • Don

    and a comment or two about the intensity of his high school workouts and the drop in intensity in the year that followed even if mileage increased … his entire career has been challenged by injury

    some kid will read this thing and try to copy it

    What does Dathan mean by best weeks … hardest, most intense …

  • http://www.pacewheel.com/jjohnson.aspx Michael Pollard

    It's like the old adage: He who ceases to get better ceases to be good.

    I'm confounded by the difference Ritz notes between his consistent fitness level under Brad Hudson and the significant peaking under Alberto Salazar. There might not be a “right way” to do it, and this goes back to the Peaking discussion from before, but clearly Ritz feels that he does his best when he gets to peak, and maybe it's a psychological bonus — running faster (better?) than you have all season.

    I've got a kid who was in shape at the beginning of the cross country season and felt disappointed that his improvement wasn't as significant as some of the others. I suppose he could have not trained over the summer and seen a larger net change in minutes and seconds from the day 1 to regionals, but (I believe) his regional time was faster through consistency than it would have been the other way. I dunno.

  • Rhymenocerous

    Michael Pollard say:
    “I'm confounded by the difference Ritz notes between his consistent fitness level under Brad Hudson and the significant peaking under Alberto Salazar. “

    One should note that Ritzenhein has been training under Salazar for what, 7-8 months now? Included in that period were two track races in Europe, World Half, a two-week break, and whatever training has been completed up to this point. Seems a bit premature to be making conclusions when so little data has been collected. I'm sure Ritzenhein felt out of shape coming off the break as he probably hasn't gone that long without structured exercise of some sort since middle school. But if an indoor race or two and World Cross are indeed on the schedule, I have to imagine he's in pretty good shape at the moment, especially considering how quickly he gets fit.
    Looking at another Salazar athlete, Rupp ran 13:18 in February last year and had roughly equivalent performances through August. Not sure where the significant peak was there.

  • http://www.pacewheel.com/jjohnson.aspx Michael Pollard

    Rhymenocerous writes: “Not sure where the significant peak was there.”

    Exactly. Is there a peak in actual racing time? Or is it a peak in race quality? Perhaps my use of the word “significant” that is causing problems here, but I think we're saying the same thing: has Ritz' change in coaches resulted in superior performances? Perhaps not.

    Is Rupp's age an issue here? (i.e. is Ritz' “advanced age” more receptive to the training that Alberto advocates? More questions here than answers (in fact, I don't think I've got answers at all).

  • Rhymenocerous

    I think what's probably going on here is Ritzenhein is doing what many others have done: digging really hard for reasons why a major decision was the right thing to do and just how great everything has turned out, even when there isn't nearly enough data to come to these conclusions.

    Regarding the age difference – it's really not that big (~3 yrs.), and when you take into account how much time Ritzenhein has missed via injury and how Rupp has been training essentially like a professional athlete since high school, their 'training ages' are probably pretty close.

  • selfcoach

    Here is what Greg McMillan said during the interview with letsrun last night.
    Exactly to what this conversation is about.

    “What’s really interesting is we know the amount of mileage that athletes have to run to perform well. We know the training that it takes to be great. The problem is we can’t do that training yet so we have to take a step back and say I need to do this training to get that training. But we can’t do that training yet so we are three steps behind.

    This concept is so huge because as Americans there are still many coaches out there who are looking for that shortcut cookie cutter plan. Sites like jays and letsrun where the conversation is open and secrets are not kept under someones sleeve and blue collar work are gonna get America back being a regular on the medal pedestal.