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

It’s an important question this time of year because the work you do in the next four to six weeks will determine “the tools” that the athletes has on their toolbelt come race time (i.e. you can’t expect a miler of average ability to be able to shift gears at 300m to go and again at 100m to go if you haven’t started a progression of speed development, as speed takes time).

Want an 800m runner to be able to “get out” in the first 50m and run a slight positive split race between the first 400m and the second 400m? Similarly, do you want them to come through 600m at a blistering pace and then run a solid last 200m, which will likely result in passing several competitors? Or maybe you believe the the only way to run the event is to run even splits?

Have you empowered the 1,600m runners to deal with the pace changes and “moves” that typify great races at that distance? Can they go out slow and run each successive 400m faster than the previous? Can they go out hard for 800m or 1,000m, then decelerate a bit for the next 400m or so, then be able to switch gears and run faster…and switch again if need be, running their fastest?

Do you want to see a 3,200m runner simply get on his or her edge for that race and run eight even splits, or do you expect to see some faster laps (or at least a faster 200m) at the end of the race?

I don’t go to high school meets weekly, so my opinion regarding these questions may be skewed. If you have some time (and I know you may not now that you’re back in school) I’d love to hear your opinions regarding these questions, specifically, how you think athletes should run each of the three disciplines.

I’m speaking in 10 days at the OATCCC clinic and I want to make sure I’m helping those in attendance. Thanks for your assistance.

One of the things he talked about is that he likes to work both ends of the continuem when coaching high school athletes. At one end is mileage, so he’s trying to build it as big as he safely can (say, 70 miles a week for a male who is a senior in high school) while simultaneously working the other end of the continuem, working on their speed. As many of you know, I hate the term speed work, and it’s important here because when Steve and I say the word “speed” we’re talking about the fastest you ran run for a given distance or duration, be it 100m on the track or 8 seconds up a hill. Steve has had great success with high school boys – just look at this list – and I asked him to talk in detail about the progressions he uses with his high school kids. We’ll be sharing that in podcast form in the coming weeks, but in the meantime I wanted to remind everyone reading this of a simple fact. If you’re an athlete, you’re faster than you think; if you’re a coach who works with athletes, remember, they’re faster than you think. You can develop speed while running a lot…and developing speed is one way to improve Running Economy.

As Steve and I discussed (and as Alberto Salazar mentioned in his talk on Saturday afternoon at the conference) you have to work on speed all year long. This time of year, you have to be safe – don’t try to run fast on snow and ice! Maybe that means running up ramps in parking garages or running in the hallways if your high school. But remember, there are more fast-twitch fibers available to you as a runner than you’re using; you have the fibers, but your nervous system hasn’t been trained to recruit all of them.

No doubt this is a much broader topic than we can cover in a short blog post, but if you haven’t read this post on speed development you might want to take a look.

Remember, you/they are faster than you think.

Dear Coach Jay,

I’m a sophomore in high school and I was wondering what good ideas for winter workouts are. Usually, my team would do mostly distance runs in the winter. This year, I was thinking of adding a tempo, fartlek, or interval workout a few times a week. Do you have any suggestions for other workouts to do in the winter to help prepare for track season?

Thanks,

Ryan

Hi Ryan,

Thanks for the question. It’s great you’re already looking toward the winter months to set a good foundation of fitness for outdoor track.

On one hand, getting in the miles via distance runs is a great way to train. You’ll improve your aerobic fitness and that will no doubt lead to faster times in the track season. However, you’re not going to run to your potential in the outdoor season if you just do distance runs in the winter. Why? Because speed takes time to develop, (and maintain,) and if you’re not doing focused strides – at 800m pace and faster – then you’re not going to reach your potential come spring. Now, you have to be careful with this. Iif the roads are icy and snow-packed you can’t go out and do 5 x 150m at 800m pace. But the flip side is you’ve got to find a way to get some race pace strides in twice a week at a minimum (and three or four times a week is even better).

One thing to keep in mind is what Bill Bowerman called “date pace” vs. “goal pace.” For example, if today you could run 800m in 2:04, then that’s 31.0 seconds per 200m and that’s your date pace. If you hope to run 1:56 by the end of the season, then that’s 29.0 seconds per 200m; that’s your goal pace. You and your coach should sit down and come up with a progression of strides, starting in November/December and ending with your state meet that takes you from your date pace to your race pace.

Finally, I really liked that you identified fartlek runs and threshold runs as key workouts because those workouts, along with a weekly long run, is all you need in the winter…plus the date pace strides.

Best of luck Ryan!

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.

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.

Hey Coach, I have a question for you. When running hills, what is the best running position to be in for maximum efficiency and speed? My reason for asking is another coach and I have different philosophies about technique when running up a hill. His take on form while running up a hill is that running tall with your hips underneath you is most effective and efficient. Mine, on the other hand, is that your upper body should be slightly bent forward with your hips shifted slightly back.

Scott

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.