Peaking

Saw you 2 or 3 rows in front of me in Colorado Springs in October. I haven't coached a 15:20 yet; my best so far was a 20-year-old at 16:21 indoors. Hopefully 10 weeks from now she'll go sub-16. I don't think that 16:21 was really her peak, I think that 16:21 was what was left over after her peak the week before (2-day triple of 4:45 DMR 1600m, 4:53 mile, 9:40 3km, less than 24 hours from start to finish). For that she tapered for a week and a half, trimming the hard volume of the key days. Early in the taper, a week before the triple, was a 4:55 mile PR. Before the taper were four and a half weeks of some key days at VO2ish or more acidic. Before that were about 7 weeks of nothing more intense than threshold (although yes some nonacidic legspeed).

I think about McDougal's 3:57 mile a couple of years ago from just basework. It seemed to me that his improvement over the years was from adding mileage, from threshold and VO2 naturally getting faster over the months and years, etc. Rupp probably similar. Routine not much different year to year, just naturally at a little bit higher level as time goes by. When McDougal won NCAA cross country he seemed maybe influenced by the Scott Simmons end-of-season method.

What I've been thinking through lately is, is it more a matter of when to start a 6-week intense phase (or 5 weeks, or 4 weeks, or 3 weeks, or whatever), or could it be more a matter of making sure that after acidic workouts blood pH has enough days to return to normal before another acidic dose?

I'm not a huge proponent of 'peaking'… never have been. As a collegiate runner back 10 years ago and then when I got into high school and collegiate coaching, my thought (while an athlete) and message (while a coach), was there is not such 'thing' as peaking.

Training times, racing times, etc… are a continuous cycle (as you noted above), the theory of start the new season where one ended the last season provides a better long term scope on development rather than each season or race being a means to a specific end.

As you pointed out, we all can give many examples of when peaks didn't work… and we can also give many examples when PRs and season's best were run mid-season / during the hardest training block – and although these are easy references to use, they are references and examples nonetheless.

A training block or cycle can be directed towards a specific goal race, but I believe it is key to be ready to race, and race fast, throughout an entire season, not just in the final meets or races.

The top DI teams in the country abide by this… by racing only a few times a year (indoor and outdoor) for example, athletes are trained to race, and race really fast when they toe the line… doesn't matter if it's Tyson in winter, Stanford in March, or NCAAs in June.

Smaller schools and divisions (DII, DIII, NAIA), etc. (outside of a few rare exceptions) tend not to follow this train of thought. Training is setup to be ready for their conference meet, etc. More focus is on regionalized competitions, which I think hinders the development of the athletes.

As you noted, I think we can all write and write about this topic… but I think 'peaking' is more of a mental 'gear up' for the big day, than a physical readiness.

I think you have to take a finer approach to the term distance. As you move through the distance the more there is a need to have a peak season I believe. The marathon is the best example of this. Would you really run your best effort possible running 140-160 miles a week?

Another thought would be to know exactly what Rupp training was Feb-Aug. Was Salazar performing mini peaks for each race or was it training to be in top shape for the length of time?

Also another comment I wanted to make was Jay's “specificity of training needs to come earlier this year” thought.

I coach high school athletes and a couple adult runners on the side and have brought in event specific running very early in the season and ive had great results with doing it. I just space out the workout in the early part of the season to about once every 3 weeks about. So then the next season you would introduce the new goal pace as a way of progressing. The key to it all though is recovery and type of running you do after this. I stay out of the anaerobic spectrum for a bit and keep on the aerobic side of things. Usually the next workout will be a threshold with the HM pace as Pfitzinger believes and not the daniels and most others 10k threshold or isocapnic threshold. I find that then the next time we do the event specific workout followed by the threshold HM pace that workout is usually faster by 8-10secs per mile then the last one.

I tend to agree that peaking is overated. I think it's a bit of a fallback crutch to rely on as coaches by saying “wait till we back off and peak.” In my opinion, peaking is essentially getting the athletes feeling right on race day both mentally and physically.

The sport isn't the same as it was when Lydiard was constructing his schedules. I think it was Peter Coe who said that you can never be too far from race shape. I know Canova has echoed this thought. Meaning if you are aiming for a 1:44 800, you better be in at least 1:47-8 shape during the base/winter. Every year I tend to look at the HS season as similar to the college and even Pro season. The system has to be altered when you have in XC egionals/state/NXN regionals/Nationals for a HS CC team on consecutive weekends. It's no longer a process of aiming for 1 specific meet.

All that being said, I think singular peaking is almost dead, with a few exceptions (marathons perhaps).

With the HS guys I train, I tend to look at peaking as getting their legs feeling like they need to be each race. I like to look at it in terms of muscle tension alteration. It's simplifying the process but it tends to work well. If they look flat in the week/days proceeding the important race, then we do stuff to increase tension (sprints/fast work/ reactive work/etc.). If they are a distance guy and they look too bouncy/too high muscle tension/legs feel reactive but tire quickly then we do lots of threshold type work/runs on grass/slower paced work. I think manipulating how the legs feel and bringing them back after each race for the next week is one of the keys to 'peaking.'

I read this site at least a couple / few times a week. I wanted to post something different than others as a means of provolking quality discussion. The problem is I tend to agree with most everything that is posted. I like the GS ideas, the long chat on books and Daniels, and now I agree wholeheartedly on the value of a slight taper over a more complex and risky peak. I must say, we've got a good group of coaches/runners that visit this site. A couple of which I know personally and a bunch I look forward to meeting. This site is quickly becoming a great educational site. Thanks to Jay for the great topics. Keep it coming.

(At the risk of showing my ignorance) The more I think about this, the more I'd like to hear people's exact definitions. What exactly do you mean when you say you believe in / don't believe in “peaking”? More importantly, how exactly does this belief affect how you plan your coaching over the course of a high school year, vs if you had the opposite belief?

When I think of “peaking”, I get nervous. It is hard to stand confidently on such a small, sharp point that is so far away from what is supposed to be holding you up and keeping you safe.

I have had plenty of correspondence over the years with Renato Canova–just for my own questions regarding training and for some of the articles I have written–and one of the coolest things he ever talked to me about was minestrone soup. Now, I realize I may be partial here with my Italian heritage and all, but the concept and how he explained it to me is awesome, and I think quite relevant here.

Simply stated, he told me that in order to train a distance runner for a specific performance, a coach needed to approach the task like you would make minestrone.

“If you want to put in the cold water some potatoes, tomatoes, beans and other vegetables before cooking, it is not important which vegetable is the first going in the pot.”

Basically, Renato was telling me that if you want something in your soup when it is finished, it has to be in there from the beginning. Better yet, he was saying in some ways that the order itself did not even matter–it was just important that the good stuff was in there.

See the analogy?

Now, a good minestrone is not one where you can pick all the pieces out by sight or by spoon. A good minestrone cooks for a long time and all the ingredients essentially merge together into a tasty mush–kind of like we would want our training to work inside of our athletes. This is where the great flavor (performance) is produced.

Some points of elaboration from a clinic I did over the summer where I explored Renato's idea a bit:

“Minestrone Maxims”

1. The only true recipe for minestrone is to use the vegetables that are in season (What do you need to do to create the performance you desire from this particular season? XC or Track? LD or MD?)

2. The amount of each ingredient depends on who is eating the soup (What does each particular athlete prefer/need/want from their training?)

3. A good soup is the result of a lot of preparation (Have a plan and be patient enough to follow/adjust it as needed.)

4. If you want it in there when it is time to eat, have it ready from the beginning (Don't wait to “peak” the athlete with speed–it has to be there from Jump Street! If they can only run 100m at goal pace when you start, then start with 100m!)

5. It doesn’t matter which vegetable goes in first as long as it is in there (Long to short, short to long, squeeze to the middle, speed to extension, quantity to quality–call it what you want or don't call it anything–just get the stuff in there so you can “start cookin'”)

6. Ingredients do not come out, but more can be added (Never take anything out, because if you need to remove something at any point, chances are it should not have been in there in the first place. Hence the reason why “peaking” scares me–it most often involves people getting away from the very things that got them to where they are now. “Dance with the girl ya brought!”)

7. Taste test the soup (Always check and review and adjust what you are doing–that is how good seasons become great. Remember that these are people that you are working with, not numbers. Renato says, “Don’t ask the athlete to follow the physiology. Have the physiology adapt to the athlete.” This means we need to make changes.)

8. You can only serve so much before it is gone (You have to know not only when you are ready to rock, but also when to hang 'em up and call it a day. Once you reach the “bottom of the pot”, no amount of scraping stainless steel will bring out more “soup”)

I am writing this really late here, but I have stood by and feasted on all the great stuff you guys have been putting up here for quite some time, and I felt a little guilty. Wanted to go to bed with a clear conscience.

Needless to say, I have taken these ideas and applied them pretty successfully so far both with my HS kids, as well as my post-collegiate/elite athletes. Even had a guy pick up his first Sub-4 this fall at The 5th Avenue Mile in NYC going with this “minestrone” approach.

Literally some food for thought…(actually, it's still figuratively, but whatever…)

First thing, I think it matters very little how fast the athletes you work with are. Last year I keep thinking how I wasn't that much better of a coach than 2-3 years prior, even though Renee and Sara were at a much higher level than the athletes I had worked with 2-3 years ago (include Sara 1.0 vs. 2.0). Training age and background also play a role as I have no doubt that at basketball or soccer background means that the an athlete with decent fiber type for 800m has much better buffering capacity all year long…or that it takes fewer killer sessions to develop that capacity. This is just a guess and maybe some of the physiologists can chim in.

But what I need to do at this point is have someone lay out the typical Lydiard sharpening phase, complete with workouts. That model, combined with the idea that bufffering capacity takes about 8 weeks to fully develop, are the roots, historic and physiological, for the modern “peaking.”

Plus, we need to define the term taper relative to peak. To me a taper is first and foremost a swimming term/concept; the training volumes relative to race distance are huge in swimming and unless I misunderstood something in the book Gold in the Water, the taper for a swimmer is a dramatic reduction in training volume (though they spent a ton of time in the cool down pool, which I found interesting). In our sport the idea for a collegiate male cross country runner would be 90-100 miles per week during the season then down to 70's the last 2-3 weeks of the season. But obviously there is no discussion of intensity in that last sentence and to me that's where the confusion between these two terms start. If the intensity stays the same (and the volume of the intensity – i.e. say you run 1.2xrace distance for workouts pre-taper and do the same in the taper) during the taper then to me this isn't the lydriard/buffering capacity peak. But if you change the workouts dramatically, say you go from 1ks at 10 xc pace at race pace to 600s at 3k pace, then you're doing something different.

And this is where our conversation could get interesting and educational. I do believe in some work faster than race pace near the end of the season as I'm sure many of you do. However, I want to do most of the work at race pace and use the faster race pace work as a check to see if the athlete can do it, with the assumption being that if they can then we're not working too hard, and I want to run faster than race pace to empower the athlete with the ability to change gears/speed/velocity. But I don't consider this the peak that Lydiard used and I know it's different than the peak that I know will work with young or novice or undertrained high school kids – lot of fun, general running for as long as possible then a meet each where (with a race and a 4x400m leg) and then a killer anaerobic workout, then lots of rest and laughter and grab-ass in between (note: I'm not saying this works for state champion caliber kids, but it will work for a 16 year old who didn't run XC but played JV Basketball and could be the 4th runner on the 4×800 relay).

I'll stop for now as I want to make sure others have opportunity to comment, but that's my thought relative to Wetmorefan.

Great question and relative to Dave Racey's point below, maybe coaches can list what they did several years ago that worked decently well and what they do now that they think works better.

In terms of definitions, I'll propose that the following define peaking:

- a small window of 1-2 weeks in the competitive phase
- addition or emphasis on workouts that produce lactate
- addition or emphasis on workouts at race pace or faster than race pace
- and understanding on the part of the athlete that they are expected to run their best at this time; can be implicit or explicit

Tapering or a Taper is simple a reduction in training volume, though others should add something to that if they thinks this is to simple.

When you compare the two I think the complex vs. simple dichotomy comes up; in a taper you just do what you've been doing all year long but run less volume while a peaking phase has a lot of different and/or novel elements.

Again, feel free to tweak and add to this.

I really like the idea of “introduce the new goal pace” and then “stay out o the anaerobic spectrum for a bit and keep the aerobic side of things.”

Now, this is easier said than done. If a HS boy has run 16:40 for 4k then that is 5:20 per 1,600m; if he wants to run 16:00 then that's roughly 5:08 per 1,600m or 77's. So does he do 200's at 38.5 (the 200m split for 77 pace) or does he do 800s at 2:34? Is a 2:35 aerobic or anaerobic? If you give the kid 2 min between the 800's vs. 5 minutes between the 800's is the first anaerobic and the second aerobic?

My guess is that the longer you coach the more the above comes by feel, yet for many of us we're still feeling our way through this.

Thanks Ryan.

I think that the only percentage that matters is what percentage of the race distance at goal pace can a particular runner do reps at time and again. I mean, it looks like you are using these reps to “introduce the new goal pace” and then “stay out of the anaerobic spectrum for a bit and keep the aerobic side of things”–that's what the original poster said. With that goal in mind, forget about the breakdown and just look at the specifics of the desired result. Train for the performance not for the physiology, and if the physiology gets in the way, shorten the reps or lengthen the rest or do fewer reps.