First and Second Presentation: 13 Week Training Schedule
6-page Handout – click here
Color version of 13 week training schedule – click here

The videos that correspond to the 13-Week training schedule are as follows: Lunge Matrix Warm-Up and Myrtl

Use the videos from the the Eight Week General Strength Progression to see Cannonball, Grant Green and the three exercises that comprise the Later Lunge (LL) warm-up (LL warm-up is: lateral lunge – 10m, single leg lunge – 3 x 3 on each leg, lateral shuffle – 20m)

Also, check out the Speed Development article and video from Running Times.

13 week Training Schedule

Third Presentation: Threshold Training
Handout – click here

Forth Presentation: General Strength for High School Athletes
Handout (13 week General Strength and Mobility document…good resource) – click here

Simple question: If you were to design a routine that strengthened the hip girdle area and lasted five minutes or less, what exercises would you use, how many reps and in what order?

Couple of things to consider:

•  This comment and this comment correctly highlight that lateral leg raises are targeting the lower back and gluteal muscles.
• Maybe something that looks like one thing is actually another.  I never thought of the leg swings as an ankle mobility exercise.  Please take the time to read number three on Mike Boyle’s list of Eight Mobility Drills Everyone Should Do. (Note: Gary Gray is person who came up with the Lunge Matrix.)

So here we go – let’s see what we come up with. There are thoughtful people reading this blog and the collective knowledge of the group is many multiples of my individual experience.

I suggest you link to YouTube videos in your comments as our comment service (Disqus) will show a thumbnail of each video you reference.

Can’t wait to see what you come up with!

I got the following question from a reader in response to the eight week general strength progression. I thought the question was important and justified it’s own post.

I coach cross country and we used these routines with great success. We started indoor where I am the assistant coach and I had my distance runners do this routine after their run. The Head coach saw them doing the lateral leg raise and told them not to point their toes up or down as this works the hip flexors and they already work those enough with our running workouts.  She is a personal trainer and is very knowledgeable but we had no hip flexor issues in cross country and we ran injury free all year. Coach Johnson I would love to hear your thoughts.

I think this is a great question and brings up a several issues that I feel strongly about. The first issue is that when the cross country coach becomes the distance coach in track, they’re open to some level of management from that person. I don’t like this set up (and encourage coaches to coach both for this reason) but that’s the way it works. But ideally the head track coach simply worries about their event area and worries about the cohesiveness of the team…which should easily take up the majority of their time (not to mention the meet entries for both JV and Varsity meets, which can take hours). What troubles me is that it sounds like the head coach made this comment in front of the athletes as they were performing the exercises. If so, shame on the head coach. After listening to the athlete, respecting and backing your assistant coaches is one of the most important things a head coach does. But hopefully I’m wrong and the head coach simply pulled the assistant coach aside and gave their opinion. And if so, great. It’s just their opinion.

The facts, as presented by the cross country coach, are this. The cross country team has been doing GS, including lateral leg raises, and they we free from hip flexor issues this fall. Maybe they got lucky. Or maybe the Lunge Matrix, the Pedestal strength and the various leg swings in Myrtl are the reason the athletes stayed healthy. Who knows. Regardless, the cross country coach is doing something right if the team had no hip flexor issues as hip flexors issues are extremely common in runners.

What bothers me about the comment that “the athletes are already doing enough work for their hip flexors when they run” is that the comment is not only ignorant relative to running injuries (and their causes) but it highlights the reductionist view of many personal trainers. Personal trainers teach lat pull downs to help a client achieve arms that look “toned.” Great. Please keep that reductionist view of training at the local health club; don’t taint the thoughtful work distance coaches are doing when they attempt to systematically infuse ancillary work into their running training (a task that is more art than science, more macro thinking than micro thinking). The reality is that most runners have weak hip flexors…and running more isn’t helping these runners. Running on weak hip flexors causes more disfunction and what we’re doing with our ancillary work is often simply correcting dysfunction. You can get marathoners on a table and a good PT, orthopedic, massage therapist or chiropractor who will be shocked at both the inflexibility around the hip joint and the weakness of their hip flexors.

It would be interesting to ask some of the kids if the lateral leg raises are easy. I’ll bet many of them say “No! It should be easy but it’s hard. I can feel the muscles on the side of my butt seize up.” Now, don’t take this comment as we need “a good hard burn” to know we’re working, yet isn’t it interesting that moving your leg back and forth in the frontal plane can cause “a burn” in a well trained runner?

So Chris (the coach that wrote in), feel free to make me the bad guy and say you found that this stuff works and you want to keep doing it. If the head coach doesn’t like that answer, then take the lateral leg raises out and start doing the Lateral Lunge (LL) warm-up and that will do similar work for the athlete…though ideally you’d be able to do both the leg lifts in Myrtl and the LL warm-up.

Thanks for the question Chris and I wish you and the athletes the best in their training and racing.

Why? Two reasons. First, he’s the only person who you can put in the category of “strength and conditioning coach” who has a blog and is first and foremost a track coach. My assumption is you come to this site because of the focus on distance running; Vern’s fundamental views are rooted in track and field and this is the reason I value his opinion over the other resources out there (and some of them are good, don’t get me wrong). The second reason is that he’s very much a macro, big picture, process oriented thinker. I’ll be responding later this week to a comment made by a personal trainer to a distance coach and in that post I’ll raise the simple question, “What type of biases are they brining to their craft?” Many strength coaches (and definitely personal trainers) come from the world of hypterophy where the goal is to gain mass en route to gaining strength. Related is the fact that body building principles underly much of the thinking in strength and conditioning…and that’s all well and good when these practicioners work with football and basketball athletes, or any other athlete who needs some “armor” in the form of muscle to play their sport to their potential. But our sport is different. Most runners need a more functional psoas and gluteus medius, but not because we need them to be bigger. And this leads my back to Vern’s site.

I’m excited to be presenting at the 2011 Canadian National Endurance Conference next weekend. I wanted to see what Vern says about the squat and how he utilizes it (if at all) in training. If you Google “vern gambetta squat” you get this post first. It’s a fantastic example of work you won’t see elsewhere – i.e. no one is under a squat rack and no one is going for the “1.5-2.0 x body weight” goal that you often read about – as well as another reason why I like reading his blog; he did this himself before he assigned it to his athletes. Because of his blog I started doing the same. I skipped backwards downhill a year before I ever asked an athlete to do it (though I will admit that it’s partly because when running the Mesa Trail in Boulder it’s easier to go backwards down this road – pic and map – than it is to run down it). Conversely, I onced asked Coach Wetmore how a coach could ask an athlete to race a 5k, 3k, mile triple over two days 7,000 ft. in a meaningless early season meet at the Air Force Academy. His answer was simple: “That coach doesn’t run. If he did he’s never ask an athlete to do that.” Note: Wetmore’s running streak spans every day that his current athletes have lived.

So I guess that makes three reasons to read Vern’s blog. He’s a former decathlete who loves track. His view is broad and his approach is about the process. And he’s done much of the training he assigns himself.

You can follow him on twitter at @coachgambetta.

There’s something in Daniel’s article that I think is important for coaches and athletes to understand. Coach Mark Wetmore said of the women’s team:

“Honestly, this year, we gambled a little bit and focused on the conference championship more than usual,” Wetmore said. “It was the first year in the Pac-12 and CU wanted to have an impact. In the case of our younger women, they already had raced hard at our conference meet and were a little over the hump.”

Here’s a coach who knows when the athletes are going to run their best; it’s calculated and to a large extent, it’s controlled. Sounds simple, but it’s actually very difficult. Many teams and many runners train hard all the time, running a nice race here and there, yet they can’t “call their shot” and run their best on a specific date. But this is the point of training – to be able to run your best on a specific date (and at a specific distance) – and I think it’s important for coaches and athletes to go back and analyze their training to see if they’re running their best when when they want to. Again, simple concept – run your best on the day you’ve chosen as “the big day” – but much easier said than done.

The other thing that I though I should share is this question that Daniel sent me via twitter.

@coachjayjohnson: Reader asked me why women run 6K and men run 10K in #NCAAXC. Do you know why the divide still exists?

I responded with:

@danielpetty politics that havent changed. Favors schools with strong middle distance as you can see with the top four. Sexist? Maybe.

It is a bit odd, isn’t it, that there is such a big difference in the length of the race? And while my wife, who was an All-American in cross country at Georgetown, is very happy with yesterday’s outcome (Georgetown – ranked number one at the start of the season, yet never won a meet until yesterday – won it’s first NCAA title), there is little doubt in my mind 6k cross country is a completely different beast than 10k cross country. Both challenging, both aerobic, but 10k training is much different than 6k training, the same way 5k training is different than 10k training.

If you have 15-20 minutes check out these two workouts (from 2006 and 2009 respectively) and you’ll see what I mean.

University of Colorado

University of Washington

I love both workouts. Gold Hill is a wonderful place to get a great aerobic stimulus. Conversely, I love Coach Metcalf’s replication of the race – get out hard, maintain, finish strong. And to be sure, Colorado does workouts similar to the Washington workout and Washington no doubt does long runs. But the point I’m trying to make is that it’s interesting that women only run 6k at the NCAA level while men run 67% longer…which is a big difference, a difference that would likely force female athletes at their coaches to re-evaluate their training. And in a day and age of blogging and tweeting I’m surprised more adult female runners don’t ask the same question that was posed to Daniel – “Why do the women run so much shorter than the men at the NCAA Championships?”

Just a question and you may or may not be interested in discussing it. If you are, comment below and I’ll add my thoughts. Again, congratulations to the CU men – a well deserved trophy to a group of men that having been training extremely hard.

Today I fly to Chicago and on Saturday I’ll reunite with the four athletes I’ve been coaching for the 2011 Chicago Marathon. They’ve done a tremendous job the past sixteen weeks training for Sunday and I can’t watch them race.

At this point the workouts are done and all that remains are easy days – easy runs with strides (as well as one day off). The strides are important neuromuscularly because you want marathon pace to feel easy when the gun goes off and doing some faster strides – 5k pace or faster – makes this possible.

The bottom line is that in these final days before the big race it’s important to be excited and focused on race, yet you can’t let your excitement get you so wound up that you’re flat come race day. You want to spend a little time – five to ten minutes – each day visualizing the race, but you want to make sure that practice doesn’t get you so excited that you can’t stop thinking about the race or that you stay up at night thinking about the race.

Good luck to everyone running the 2011 Chicago Marathon and if you’re on the course look for Orlando, Traci, Kate and Matt.

Coach,

I have been following a training system for my high school cross country team which is relatively low miles (top athletes 40-45 miles a week), mainly because they are young and also because we are trying to change the culture and get more athletes out.  We mix up the energy systems, but obviously our focus and the bulk of our miles are aerobic.  On the days following or just before we have raced or have come off of a challenging tempo or VO2max specific workout, what type of pace and volume should I be having them run?  For instance a continuous trail or road run, followed by strength and flexibility work.  The previous coach took hard-easy days to the extreme, so some of the older athletes expect recovery runs every time their is a challenging workout, which with as much as high school XC teams race in Oregon, could be a third of their running.  Is it okay to follow a hard aerobic workout with a strength or speed/speed endurance workout, maybe once during a two week microcycle?  Any advice would be much appreciated.  Thank you.

Thanks for the question and hopefully I can be helpful.

Lots to think about here and while I don’t have month of your workouts and races in front of me to really understand what you do, one thing that I would definitely recommend is the following. If you’re going back to back days, then do something fast followed by something slower. Interesting that you’re writing from the Pacific Northwest as I can vividly remember running a 8k cross country race as a college athlete in Pasco Washington on a Saturday, then doing a 20 miler on a bike path in Seattle the next day. I ran 2:06 or 2:08 and was the last guy to finish the run (maybe 12th or 13th, don’t remember). Just 16 months earlier I had been a high school athlete who had one 10 mile run as his longest run, making that 2:06 or 2:08 somewhat impressive. The point I’m trying to make is that because my legs had turned over at 8k pace on Saturday, the 6:10 pace was only an aerobic issue, not a neuromuscular issue.

This same principle can be exploited in track. When I was coaching Sara Vaughn I would use speed development workouts on Monday and follow that up with a race pace workout on Tuesday. Same principle – you’re able to more comfortably run faster on day two because the pace is slower than day one.

So how can this work for a HS program? An easy long run following a race makes sense for many programs, especially if the race is on Friday. Then you meet for the long run on Saturday, then – assuming state rules don’t allow Sunday practice – they either run easy on Sunday or take the day off.

…but if you do back to back days, I’d just do it once a week and I wouldn’t plan to do it every week all season long. Soon I’ll write a post about recovery and fact that many athletes, especially those who put in a good summer and have done all of the assigned work, can benefit from an easy day with strides rather than a workout late in the season. Again, it’s hard to comment when I can’t see multiple weeks of what you’re doing, but the point I’m trying to make is that you don’t want to go back to back twice in a week, i.e. four quality days.

Now, I’m sure someone is thinking, “Wait, I read Running with the Buffaloes and when you ran at Colorado you guys did a Sunday long run, a workout Tuesday, a medium distance day Wednesday and a workout Friday. That’s four quality days.” True. But the training age is higher in that cohort of college athletes and the reality is that Mark had a lot of guys on the team running, essentially, for five spots. It’s a bit Darwinian but as a guy who “made the team (top seven)” twice and missed it once (and never had a shot two other times), I can wholeheartedly say that I wouldn’t have wanted to be in any other program.

…yet that darwinian environment might not be what you want in your program. Let’s be honest, there’s a big difference in philosophies between high school coaches, some who could care less if the runner will continue to improve in college while others want to “leave some in the tank” in hopes that the athlete runs well past high school. This an issue for another post, but the bottom line is that when I respond to high school coaches I make the assumption that they’re in the second camp.

So, in conclusion, if you do this back to back days thing one week, I don’t think you have a thing to worry about. I think you could even do it for week one, week two and then on week three give them an extra easy day and you’d be fine. And I think the easiest assignment is simply to have their long run on the day following a meet. Or, you can have a race pace workout on the first day and follow it with a threshold run the second day. You can play with this, making the run just moderately long, but then finishing with some general strength, or even finishing with a circuit at threshold pace. This is a tough two day cycle, but again, if you do this workout on a Saturday following a Friday race then they can either take Sunday off or go for an easy run on their own. Finally, I know a local coach, Mike Callor at Dakota Ridge has kids running a hill workout on Tuesday and a threshold run on Wednesday (click here to read about it).

Hope this helps and I look forward to hearing what others have to say.

Adam is the boys coach at Albuquerque Academy where the boys have not only won multiple state championships in cross country and track and field, but they have qualified for the Nike Cross Nationals a number of times as well. More importantly, Adam’s a special coach in my life because he always asks how my family is and in our correspondence you can tell how important his family is to him. He’s not living vicariously through his nationally recognized team.

Adam also took the time to respond to this post on how to build a high school program. His detailed response is a gift and I feel lucky to share it with you. Thanks so much Adam for your time and your willingness to share.

Coach,

20)  I’d work endlessly, but balance that with my teaching, my family, and my life.   I’d never waiver.

The point of this post is simple. Arthur Lydiard didn’t have a PhD, but his athletes ran fast. If you go to slide 66 you’ll see that he was an advocate of training at a variety of intensities. Arthur Lydiard is arguably the most successful distance coach the world has ever known and he’s saying that his athletes run between 70% and 100% of best aerobic effort.

I think this slide is important for the following reason. Vo2 can be tested. A velocity at Vo2 (vVo2) can then be determined. These are values that can be measured (used to be that you had to go to a lab, but now the field tests are pretty reliable) and I think the reason so many coaches want to assign threshold runs based on this data is that it’s measurable. But I think we’d all be well served to make a connection between Vern Gambetta’s advice on strength training and threshold running. Who cares what your velocity at Vo2 max is if, during a 5k cross country meet, you go out too hard the first mile, struggle to maintain in the middle mile and die in the last mile. I think that’s it’s fine to do some workouts based off of a percentage of V02, vV02 or from the tremendously valuable tables in Jack Daniels’ book. But I also think there is a place for going out for a run of a certain distance and saying, “I’m just going to get in a good effort; if I feel well near the end, I might pick it up a bit.” That not only gives the athlete a better shot at being successful that day, it also helps the athlete learn where that edge is, the sensation where that tells you that you can maintain a pace for longer than 5k vs. the sensation where you’re worried you can’t make it 5k.

Final thought. My friend Dr. Robert Chapman said that the hardest thing to teach a college runner was how to properly run threshold pace. So the question is then, what is the best way to help the athletes learn that pace?

…okay, hope this doesn’t sound like a rant. As always, I look forward to your comments.

So the question is simply this: which pace should he assign the runner?

My first question in response was, “how far are they going to be running?” and his answer was four miles for the varsity (which includes the athlete in question) and then 2.5 miles for the younger athletes. That sounds good to me, assuming the athletes have all run fartlek workouts at the same distance or at least did threshold runs of that distance earlier in the summer (or at the very lest did workouts of that distance last track season). If the answer would have been six miles and four miles I would have responded that those distances are probably too far for most high school kids. A 10:24 kid will get a lot more out of a faster three miles threshold run then he will a six mile threshold effort. When he becomes a 9:24 kid, maybe a different answer. If he become a 8:54 kid then by all means, then there is definitely a place for a hard six mile, eight mile or even ten mile run. The point I’m trying to make – and the point I’ve made in the Fundamentals of Running series (specifically see Part IV) – is that I’d rather see high school cross country runners run three and four mile threshold runs because I think it gets them closer to that edge of discomfort that they’ll feel in the race.

…but I digress.

Back to the question of which pace to run, there is no doubt in my mind that I would go with the slower pace. Why? Because the athlete might be coming to practice after having had a horrible day at school and the slower pace gives them a chance to be successful. They can always speed up. And they can always run the workout as a progression run, running the first three miles controlled, then running faster, running right up to their threshold on the last mile. But my concern is that the athletes goes out hard, dies and then slows to ten or twenty seconds a mile slower than they started. This is a horrible lesson to teach your body, especially when the goal for most cross country runners is to run a slightly negative split race (though that may not be realistic on some state courses…sometimes the course dictates that you have to get out hard, maintain, then then try to speed up a bit). A threshold run where you are in control the entire way, where you finish thinking that you could have gone another mile if you had to or that you could have speed up if you had too, is, in my humble opinion, a better stimulus than a run where you’re right on the edge of racing. Remember, these kids just started school, they’re tend not to rest, hydrate and refuel very well and if you’re giving them a workout that is close right up to their capabilities you could very well get an athlete that is so tired a day or two after the workout that they aren’t ready for the next stimulus you have planned.

The other issue here is we need to be honest about what we want out of the workout and what we don’t want out of the workout. We want a good aerobic stimulus; we don’t want a mini race. Most teams are racing weekly and you don’t want to start the season with an extra race, disguised as a four mile threshold run, on your schedule. And while I’m all for your athletes running some races a “threshold efforts” I think many coaches deceive themselves into thinking the athletes are running controlled in races; that takes a lot of self-disciple, not mention the fact that it would be hard for any athlete to “dial in” 85% and maintain that rhythm. So if you’re thinking, “we actually don’t have that many races on our schedule because I’m treating races a, b, c and d as threshold runs” you may want to consider the fact that the athletes may be running well past their threshold on those days.

Okay, enough of me. No doubt some people disagree with this and no doubt some people reading this have had good success going by the book. Please comment and we’ll continue to dialogue. In part two we’ll talk about what why threshold runs are especially important for the cross country runner.