Coaching In The Championship Season: The Power of Solid Performances
Published October 16, 2024
I hope you and your team are thriving and ready for the championship meets.
Today I want to talk about expectations for your team in these final weeks.
It’s so easy as a coach to say... “If we can just have everyone run a great race on the same day, we’ll win the conference meet.” Or... “We’ll advance to state for the first time if everyone has their best race on the same day.” But the truth is, you don’t need five perfect races to move on to the next level.
With solid B+ races and a couple of A- or A efforts, your team will have a score to be proud of when you’re back at the the team tent. If you’ve coached long enough, you know that rarely will you have five, six, or seven runners run their best race of the year on the same day...though when that does happen, you can feel confident that the training in the ten days leading up to the race was spot on! 😀 If you consider for a moment what it would be like for your varsity to have B+ races as the lowest grade, with possibly an A- or A race from one or two athletes, my guess is you’d be happy with the outcome.
The Breakout Race
At the high school level, athletes do indeed have breakout races. Why? They’ll find a way to endure more discomfort in a race than they have in practice, and that leads to a stellar performance. But again, you don’t need five runners to have A- or A races on the same day to achieve a great team score. And if you’re banking on this happening—and telling the kids it must—you’ll likely be disappointed. Again, there is a very good chance that you’ll have an athlete this month run a breakout race—and we’d love for that to happen! But let’s not assume you’ll have more than one or two in the same race. The better scenario to count on is that you’ve designed training that will allow for B+ performances across the board, with one or two A- or A races.
Raise The Floor
The idea of “raising the floor” is to ensure that your lowest average performance is still good. Steve Magness talks about this in his book, Do Hard Things. The idea is that you don’t focus on what your best possible race can be, but instead raise the level of the average race. And that’s what I’m trying to encourage you to do this week: What would be solid performances across your team that are realistic based on their races and workouts? I firmly believe in race pace workouts at this time of year, and once you have an idea of their B+ level, you can give them pacing guidelines.
Remind Them That...
• They’ve had great workouts and at least one or two great races this year. • They don’t have to run the greatest race of their lives for the team to do well. • Racing will be hard, but they’ve done hard things all year, which means they’re fully prepared to race well. This is a great time of year, and I wish your team the best in their training and racing this week.
Let’s go! PS...
“I have been coming to the Boulder Running Clinics since 2019, and it has been the single greatest thing for my coaching career.”
- Jake Hays, Mount Gilead High School, Ohio
The speaker lineup is fantastic, and tickets are on sale now.
I hope you can join us January 17-18 in Boulder!
Jay Johnson
