CHSCA Clinic

Hey Coach Jay Johnson, I recently purchased your running videos Building a Better Runner Vol 1 and 2. I did the download option however several of the videos are cutting off before they complete. Like back routine stops right after side ups. Several of the videos are doing that. Is that on my end or is that video itself

Hey Coach Jay,
I am a college coach and I am concerned about introducing too much to my freshman. Higher mileage, weightlifting, circuits, plyos, dynamic stretching, and yoga. How do I add all of this and not over do it?

Hi Jay, it's your favorite e-mail artist, Kent Garrett. This cross-country season was un-believeable. The tournament in Indiana works this way.

Sectional
Regional
Semi-State
State

In all the meets, the top 5 teams advance and the top 15 individuals ON OR OFF a qualifying team advance.
Indiana is not classed. We are a 500 kid school.

I go through the 2nd toughest sectional. (6 teams ranked in the top 25 in state.)
The toughest regional.
Toughest semi-state.
And toughest state.

At the sectional I played around in a pack of 4th-10th place, moved with 600m to go and got 5th.

At the regional I got trapped in the woods and was in 23rd place with 1K to go. I caught 11 guys going up and down a hill and placed 12th.

The semi-state was wild. I was 30th at the 1 mile mark. 23rd at the 2 mile mark. With 1 K to go I was 20th. With 350 meters, I was 16th; I got 15th overall and advanced to state.

At Lavern Gibson course (ncaa national championship) I really perfected my pack running. I was 40th at the 3K, and was 31st at the 4K. I picked off 4 with 600 meters to go and ended up getting 24th; the second to last all-state spot.

I am the first athlete from my school to go to state in ANYTHING; as well as the first all-state athlete the schools ever had. I quickly became the story of Indiana running; since I never broke 18 as a freshman, yet my first race was a 16:25. I got under 16 once and plan on being in the 15:45's by next year.

http://indianarunner.com/Garrett.aspx

a website was so intrigued by my success they wanted me to write a story for them. I hope you enjoy it if you get to it. I talk about the Boulder camp multiple times.







And now, I come to you asking for help. I want to be my school's first state champion, and I want to do it the tough way; beating defending state champion (and fellow sophomre) Futsum Zeinhallase. Futsum is ranked as a top 25 runner in the nation. He won state this year in cross-country, placed 2nd last year, was an all-american (7th at Foot Locker) and won the 2 mile as well.

Yes, I want to beat him. His 3200meter PR is 9:12; He won last year in 9:14. He clearly has gotten better though.

I am looking for your help to help me defeat him. I understand you are a busy man, but I would love it if you would help me out on my scheduling of my track season.

If you are willing to help me out, please respond and I will ask some more questions. But if you are honestly too busy I simply understand.



Thanks so much for everything Jay. This experience has been un-believable, I can't thank you enough.

I hope you are enjoying life and living it to the fullest. Thank you once again.

God Bless,
Kent Garrett

Hi. I met Sara today at the 5th Ave. Mile in NYC and it was so great talking with her for a few minutes. I've been following your blog and watching/doing a lot of the drills/exercises from the myrtle to the lunge matrix and then some. I focus on long distance running, but feel like I learned a lot from your site for getting my core in shape and getting my hips conditioned. Keep up the good work. I'm doing Twin Cities Marathon next weekend...hoping for an olympic trials qualifier...will let you know how it goes. I love Jay and Sara...go team Vaughn!!

Hello there, my name is Kent Garrett. As I would imagine, you probably do not know who I am, but I obviously know who you are. I'm the contest winner for the scholarship to Boulder running camp, and I have some questions I would greatly appreciate if they were answered.



I'm going to be a sophomore this cross-country season, and I need to get my times somewhere between 16:30-16:00. I live in a flatter terrain in metropolitan Indiana, not exactly the breeding ground of cross-country runners, but my regional hosted 3 Foot Locker athletes. (Fusum Zeinhallse, Drew Shields, and Dylan Sorensen)



I commonly look at your videos posted all over runnerspace, nike.com, and I think on Flotrack. They are all so helpful, but also quite overwhelming, so I would like some recommendations.

What top 5 videos do you recommend to a sophomore cross-country runner, that is still growing, but wants to get his times to a state-qualifying time?

I would love to learn as much about running possible! I go to a small private school where there isn't an established running community; something I would like to create.

With that in mind, I have some other questions to ask:



What videos should I follow for pre-practice stretching?

What videos should I follow for pre-race stretching?

What videos should I follow for post-practice/post-race stretching?

What videos are most efficient for my core? (5' 11' 145 pound Male)

What videos should I follow to prepare me for boulder?

What is the best video to follow for quick recovery?

What other videos do you recommend?

What is a common mistake runners my age will make, that I should avoid?



I would greatly appreciate it if you took the time to respond to this message or even answer some of the questions. I'm willing to do anything to become a better runner, and I look forward to camp immensely.

Thanks again,

Kent Garrett

email me if you would like, teamindiana13@aol.com

Jay,
You mention that we are trying to make our runners better athletes. As a high school coach how would you adjust the training for those kids who are active participants in other sports during the summer? Would you modify their training or have them do what the others on the team are doing?

Dave -

First, I want to commend you for having boys in your program* participate in other sports. I think our sport needs more flexibility in this area, allowing kids to run XC even if they play fall tennis or soccer or, like Olympian Christian Smith ('08, 800m. U.S.), play football. If XC and Track are fun then the kids will gravitate toward it away from the the team sport, ball sport...we'll get better athletes pursuing distance running.

Specific to your question, my general answer is they should run a little less and that you should have an idea about the duration and intensity of the other sport practice. Think of their basketball or soccer practice in terms of running volume, or in terms of a hard day, easy day. That said, other sport coaches rarely differentiate between hard/intense days and easy days to the extent an XC coach must alter the training day, so I would hesitate to have this kid do too many workouts in the summer and instead let them run a lot of minutes and then do some 120's at 800m pace. By training both extreme ends of the running continuum for this kid - 800m pace strides and longer, aerobic running - you set them up to be able to handle the important threshold and VO2 work that comes in the fall.

Finally, I think it's fair for you to be honest about the kids future in running vs. the other sport...if you know this kid can be a stud on your team and that he/she will sit the bench in the other sport, don't hesitate to calmly communicate that to the parents and then the student. That fact, coupled with making XC and Track cool/fun at your school, will no doubt produce a really good runner in your program each year.

Thanks so much for the question Dave and again, I commend you for your openness with your program and participation in other sports...no doubt other coaches reading this will evaluate their stance on the issue.



*Dave's team not only ran at the NXN meet last fall, but they finished top 3

Jay,
I know this is hard to say not knowing strength levels, etc., but...if you were investing in some medicine balls for a group of 100-130 lb. female high schoool distance runners (for Athena and some of the other routines), what weight balls would you concentrate on?
Thanks again,

Mark

Mark -

3k or 6lb...that will be appropriate for most of their career...some 4k/8.8 lb balls may be usefull in 1-2 years, but honestly, for HS girl a 3k MB can and will be useful for her entire career. Also, if you have 20 girls you don't need 20 MBs, or even 10 MBs...you could probably buy 6-7 and assuming that on an easy day there are 2-3 different lengths of runs then the shorter running group will finish and start using the balls while the longer running group is finishing their run.

Hope that helps and thanks for the question.

Jay,
I saw you at the Gala on Saturday and, as usual, came away with a number of new ideas. Quick question: For LM, on a quality day (track, uptempo, etc.) is it done before or after the warmup run/jog? Also, on a recovery run day, I assume that it comes first, just before the run?
Thanks much and keep up the good work,

Mark McCabe

Mark -

Always done as the first thing in practice, unless the athlete do the Wharton AIS routine (i.e. the rope stretching), and in that case they do that first.

Your rationale is sound and I know it looks really challenging, but after 3-4 weeks the athletes want to do it. The LL WU is always a little challenging and so 2-3 easy days a week we don't do that as part of the WU, but on every quality day we do the LL as well.

The key with the LM and LL is to realize that activities that are at one point challenging and fatiguing will become realistic as a warm-up activity.

Thanks for the question.

What is the "Big 7?"

Jay--thanks for all the stuff this weekend! On a related note, I love the music you set the menu on the DVD to; my wife and I have it playing in our heads now!

I'd like to come down and visit over our Spring Break--March 16-20. Let me know what your schedule is and if that would be possible.

What are the dates of your spring break? I'll post a public calendar of when and where and who will be working out.

...and I'm aglow with the comments on the Music as others have bashed it as "somewhat seventies" - obviously I liked it too and obviously Apple's GarageBand is to thank...it's a lot like working in Final Cut Pro

take care.

In your general strength progression plan you list some assumed workouts... are they on the light side for a decent high school runner? it only looks like 2-3 days of running a week?

Thanks for writing CoachMac. The 4 week plan assumes that the kids are running 6 days a week; it also assumes this is a kid coming out for track that didn't do much running over the winter, yet even for the kids that ran 40-60 miles a week in the winter, they probably aren't doing more than 3 workouts a week: long run, threshold workout and some sort of fartlek or repeat 1ks or 2ks, depending on the coaches plan. But I purposely wanted to write that document very generic in terms of the running workouts because I wanted coaches to focus on the GS, not on the workouts.

The point to take from the 4 week plan is that kids need to be doing GS every day and that they should be doing a ton of GS following the workout days.

Finally, if you have kids that are fit and ran all winter then this is a great time to get a stimulus change (i.e. daily GS work) without deviating from what I will assume is a training program focused on developing the aerobic metabolism.

Good luck and thanks again for the question.

Jay, thanks for all the great resources. Will you be posting a similar general strength recommendation for cross country in the near future?

Jay,

Thanks for providing all these resources - I have used many of your drills with great success with my teams the past couple of seasons.

The links to the 2nd (GS) and 4th (Speed) Handouts above are not working. Anyway you could fix those - thanks!

Sorry about that Eric - links are working now...good think I'm not try to build website for a living as my ability to maintain simple HTML is pathetic.

Feel free to comment on anything on this page moving forward.

Jay

Thanks Jay.
Great presentation this weekend.
This definitly help the training program

What is Big 7, Big 8 and so on?

Matt -

Thanks so much for the question - I definitely forgot to explain that one, but it's quite simple...so basically I got lucky that I forgot to explain the most basic routine.

Big 7 would simply be: 7 push-ups, 7 crunches, 6 push-ups, 6 crunches, 5 push-ups, 5 crunches, etc. down to 1. This simple progression will soon become the Big 8 then the Big 10; when I coached at CU the obvious goal was the Big 12.

Now, I'm not a huge fan of the crunch, but this is a great progression because on the first day of a HS track practice because you can have 100 kids do this and you don't have to do much teaching - they known both exercises - and in the second week you can start watching body angles to make sure they're doing things correctly. Eventually the athletes should move to V-Ups (you can see an example at this link - http://www.runnerspace.com/profile.php?do=videos&pg=1&member_id=325&video_id=8326&folder_id=0&offset=11#video ) and then a back exercise (pick one from the Cannonball cool-down). So in a month it might be 8 lower body crawl, 8 push-ups, 7 push-ups, 7 V-ups, 7 push-ups, 6 lower body crawl, 6 push-ups, etc.

Hope that helps. Feel free to ask more questions as they arise and thanks so much for writing in.