Three Ways to Help Your Athletes
Published February 12, 2025
It’s mid-February, and most coaches have a variety of athletes that they are trying to help.
You’ve got some athletes that started running in December and have been fairly consistent over the holidays and all of January. You’ve got other athletes who will be joining you later this month or in March who are playing winter sports.
Today, let’s focus on the athletes who’ve been consistent this winter and what you can do the rest of this month to make sure the outdoor track season is awesome.
We’re going to use the car analogy that I talk about in my book, โConsistency is Keyโ. Even if you’re familiar with this car analogy, what I’m going to talk about today is very specific about each element of it.
You can download six chapters for FREE where I explain the car analogy by clicking โhereโ and sharing your email address. You won’t be getting multiple emails from me, but this is a way for you to get the PDF.
The Car Analogy
The car analogy is:
- Build the aerobic engine
- Strengthen the chassis
- Rev the engine
As you likely know, every event from 800m to 5,000m is more aerobic than anaerobic (even the 800m is 60 percent aerobic) so we need to make building the aerobic engine a priority.
If you’re not familiar with the 5 types of runs and workouts I use to build the aerobic engine, then you’re going to want to โread this articleโ.
I teach the workouts in the following order:
- Long Runs
- Fartlek Runs
- Progression Runs
- Aerobic Repeats
- 30-90 Fartlek
All five of these workouts are run by feel. We’re not prescribing times/paces.
That’s so important for high school athletes to learn how to do. Not only is it going to help keep them injury-free this spring, but it’s also going to help them next fall in the cross country season since they won’t be getting accurate splits throughout a cross country race.
Long Runs in Winter
One of the mistakes I see coaches make this time of year is that they’re focused on getting a long run in every 7-10 days, regardless of the weather.
When the weather’s nice, I believe in that 30-40 weeks a year you should do a long run (but don't assign a long run every week).
But as I’m writing this, it’s really cold outside - too cold for a long run. No problem! I would rather see an athlete run a 20-minute progression run today than try and do a long run.
If we think about it, what’s the goal of the long run? It’s to get an aerobic stimulus and to advance their aerobic fitness. You can do that with a progression run and they’ll only be outside for 30 or 35 minutes total.
And if it’s really cold, you could come up with some sort of bike workout.
Let’s say 5 minutes spinning easy on the bike, 10 minutes alternating between 1 minute hard and 1 minute easy, then cool down with 2 minutes of spinning. You have a total of 17 minutes.
From there, they can go immediately into their post-run work, which I’ll explain where to find those documents in a moment.
But as I talked about last week in the live class for the Michigan Coaches Association, this allows you to extend the aerobic stimulus.
It’s worth taking the time to โwatch the classโ and learn what I mean by that.
So there you go. Reconsider doing a long run on days when it’s cold and consider doing a progression run instead.
Strengthen the Chassis
You and I both know that your athletes need to be doing strength and mobility work after their runs. In 2025, this is not a “nice to do” but this is a “must do.”
Your job is to get kids bought into this, which means you’ve got to sell them on it.
One of the nice things for you in this day and age is a lot of the professional runners on Instagram are doing this type of work. Heck, even the high school athletes they follow are doing it. This shouldn’t be as hard of a sell as it was five or ten years ago, but let’s be clear that you’ve got to get kids bought into this.
Then you’ve got to get them bought into the idea that when we can, we want to go straight into this work after our running. This again extends the aerobic stimulus, and if you don’t know what I mean by that, โclick hereโ and watch the first night of last week’s class.
What are you going to do exactly in this part of the training day? That’s simple.
Just get my Track Training Essentials free 40-page PDF, and I’ve got all the post-run work laid out for you there. Just โclick hereโ and then you’ll be taken to a page where you can click a button and download the document. It will take a little bit of time for you to study this, but it’s well worth it.
And then for your kids to get these videos for free on their phone, have them โclick hereโ, share their email, and they’ll get the videos on an app.
Revving the Engine
It's 2025 and if you want your kids to run PRs all season - especially your 800m runners - go to the track once a week, starting next week.
If you’ve been reading my newsletters for a while, you know how important it is to follow the progression of strides document. If you don’t know about that one, โclick here to read an articleโ about how we use them in XC and โclick here to get the PDFโ you'll need.
The bottom line is on the first day of practice your kids should be running strides.
If they play to winter sport, they will be running strides.
If they are running on their own and are just joining you next week or the week after or 4-5 weeks from now, they will be doing strides.
But a wrinkle I added to the โTrack Training Systemโ this winter is to go to the track in week two. Coaches are loving it, and kids are loving it. What I realized is that if kids are going to run great 800 meter races in March and April, they need to be touching on that pace as soon as possible.
Now, if you’re thinking, “But Jay, they’re going to peak too early if we go to the track in February.”
That’s nonsense.
With the right training, your kids are going to PR week after week after week from March through May.
And this isn’t just my opinion. John O’Malley - who has coached two footlocker champions, and whose teams have averaged 7:46 in the 4x800m for the past 16 years - that's 1:56 per athletes - said same thing at the Boulder Running Clinics back in 2020.
This excerpt is titled “โSprinting does not lead to a too early peakโ.”
One of the biggest reasons coaches in the โTrack Training Systemโ have so many kids PRs is that we’re running faster earlier in the year.
To be clear, these are not puking over the fence workouts. This is not 10 x 400 with 60 seconds recovery in week two. Rather, this is 120s and 150s and a 300.
Faster
Earlier
The Thursday Workout
Here's the first three Thursday workouts we use in the Track Training System.
This assumes you're doing a challenging aerobic workout on Tuesday and a long run on Saturday (and running easy Mon-Wed-Fri).
Week 1
Introduction week with basic strides and post-run work. This is just an easy day with strides and hard post-run work.
Week 2
NOTE: The amount of running prior to the work on the track for these next two examples assumes kids can handle 65-75 min long runs.
Change: Moving to the track. Kids should wear their waffles or their spikes. We’re only doing 4x120m strides so it’s only 4 laps in spikes.
Trust me on this one: they’re going to be fine in terms of staying injury-free. A key point for all of these workouts is that when they change out of their spikes or waffles and go straight into the post run work. Ideally we want their heart rate to still be high from the last stride before they go into the post run work. However that’s going to be hard so don’t be rigid about this part of the training.
Description: Track workout. 25 min run then go to track and change into waffles or spikes. 4 x 120m starting at 1600m goal pace and ending at 800m goal pace. 250m jog. Don’t cool down with a jog, just go right into post-run work.
Week 3
Change: We’re going to add a 300 where the kids are going to go Fast, Faster, Fastest.
Description: Track workout. 25 min run then go to track and change into waffles or spikes. 4 x 120m starting at 1600m goal pace and ending at 800m goal pace. 250m jog. Jog a full lap, then 1 x 300m where you go Fast, Faster, Fastest each 100m. But the last 100m is NOT all out - it’s at about 95 percent. So fast, but controlled. Jog one lap, then go into post-run work.
From there we keep progression volume and reps that are appropriate.
Here's What We Learned
Let’s quickly summarize what we went over today. We went over specific parts about the car analogy, which are
- Build the aerobic engine
- Strengthen the chassis
- Rev the engine
You already know the importance of building the aerobic engine, but don’t be dogmatic about the long run. Instead, trust that a 20 minute progression run is a great way to get the kids a solid stimulus when the weather is bad.
โYou’ve got all the PDFs to start strengthening the chassisโ. Your job as the coach is to get kids bought into this. If you really want to make this training work for you, you watch the video and understand how to extend the aerobic stimulus.
Finally, in addition to following the โprogression of strides documentโ you want to be going to the track in week 2. Those three workouts I described above are what we use in the โTrack Training Systemโ. So it’s not like I’m withholding anything at this point - that’s exactly what we do - and coaches throughout the country have hundreds of kids who are loving it.
"Jay - is it too late to enroll in the track training system?"
I’m getting this question all the time, and the answer is no, it’s not.
February is a perfect time to enroll so long as you have time in the next four or five days to really dive into some videos and learn the system. If you have any questions, just reply to this email and I’ll get back to you promptly.
I know budgets are tight and that's why 30 percent of coaches who enroll use the 12-month payment plan...for training that they have lifetime access to.
February is a great time to be making some adjustments in your training and get kids to buy into a different approach to training. To be honest, once you get to the middle of March, it will probably be too late.
Let’s go!
Jay
PS - The page I put together on my site for the Michigan Coaches has a ton of free information - free downloads, free videos, and links to articles on my site.
Jay Johnson
