Here’s How You Help Your Athletes Run Their Best Race

Published September 25, 2024 

Quick question: Can an athlete race faster than their fitness level?

While high school athletes often figure out in races that they can endure more discomfort than they have in the past, the technical answer is "no."

If an athlete can’t run better than their fitness level, then their goal should be to run as close to their fitness level as possible.

So the question for you is, "How can I help my athletes I coach race to their fitness levels?"

Have Them Focus on What They Control

They don’t control the course conditions or the weather. Your upperclassmen already know this, but it's worth re-iterating this to the new athletes.

What’s harder for athletes to accept is that they can’t control how well or poorly the competition runs.

Here’s what they can control:

• Executing the plan you’ve give them

• Enduring discomfort from the middle of the race to the end of the race

• Speeding up in the last 200m, 400m, 600m, or even 800m of the race

That’s about it.

You simply want your athletes to execute a race plan where they endure discomfort and speed up at the end. If they do that, they’ll race to their potential.

One of your jobs this week and for the rest of the season is to help them embrace the fact that they need to focus on what they can control and not worry about course conditions, weather, or the competition.

Are You Focused on the Competition?

You likely are, and I don’t think that’s the end of the world.

We’ve all said some version of, “If we can just get our 4th and 5th runners to run 20 seconds faster, we’ll be able to ____.”

You’ve come to this conclusion from either head-to-head competition with other schools or looking at race results and finding teams you’ve both raced against and coming up with a hypothetical race.

I did this for hours and hours as a young coach, so if you’re doing this, I think that’s fine and part of the process of becoming a better coach.

And while I firmly believe you need to know the fast paces kids would need to run on the championship courses so that you can prepare them neuromuscularly for those races, be careful not to have expectations for kids that are a “bridge too far.”

They can run to their fitness level, but they can’t run better than their fitness level (though, as I said earlier, they may be able to figure out mid-race that they can endure more discomfort than they have up to this point in the season).

Don’t Make The “A+” Mistake

One more thing you need to preach to your athletes the rest of the season is that you don’t need all seven of them to have their best races of the year to have a great team score.

Said another way, they don’t need to run “A+” races.

Show me a team where a couple of kids had B or B+ days, a couple of others had A- days, and a couple had an A performance, and I’ll show you a coach and team that’s happy with their finish.

Should you aspire to have your athletes ready to have A’s across the board on the same day? Of course.

But I think if you take a few moments now to think about the performances you’d like each runner to have in the next meet, you’ll see that you don’t need your varsity to have seven PRs on the same day.

I’ll try to remember to reiterate this point as you go into the final meets of the season. At that time of year, all the programs that go into those races saying, “We need to run the best race of our lives” often come through both the first mile and second mile fast… but faster than they should have, and they end up fading in the last mile.

September 25 is a good time to start preaching to your kids that a bunch of B+ and A- races each week is what your team needs to accomplish your October and November goals.

Lots To Do

There is so much you can do to help your team the rest of the season.

• You can be centered and calm when the weather is problematic and you have a big workout
• You can preach the importance of sleep
• You can do ​visualizations​ with your team

And you can help them understand that they don’t need A+ races for your team to have a great day.

They simply need to follow the race plan, endure discomfort, and be ready to run fast at the end of the race when they’re uncomfortable.

Simple, not easy.

Or better yet, “Simple and hard.”

Your kids can do hard things, which makes this such an exciting time of year for them and for you.

Let’s go!

Jay

PS – Two happy coaches updated me on their team’s recent performances...

“This program has literally made a team that struggled and ran slow into a team that sets PRs every race, is healthy, and is a threat to contend for the league title.” - Coach Todd

Coach Hickerson took the time to write in to tell me his team had won a big invitational.

“We have been using your program this year and, not going to lie, I was skeptical – not because I paid for it, but mostly because there just did not seem to be enough meat on the bone in terms of the volume.

There were 26 scoring teams at this invitational. Our girls also placed 3rd and just missed winning by 11 points.

Our guys’ team has not won a major invitational in probably 15 years.

Every guy who puts the time in that you do creating a ‘system’ should be thanked when it goes well.”

These coaches and hundreds more are using the ​XC Training System​ to keep kids healthy, win big meets, and help their runners PR week after week.

While it’s too late to implement all the system this season, every year coaches marvel at how the spacing of the workouts in the last three weeks of the year – the race pace workouts, the 72-hour and 48-hour workouts, and the pre-race days – set their kids up to race to their fitness level when it counts.

You get lifetime access to the XC Training System when you enroll, allowing you to use some of it this season and then implement it fully next summer.