Your Guide to Starting 2026 Right

Published December 28, 2025

Hello!

It's almost 2026! I look forward to helping you make this your best season of track and cross country ever.

Today's blog has one quick tip that will keep your kids injury-free, then I'll go into detail about the training you should consider doing these first five weeks of the year.

Ready? Let's dive in.

The Biggest Mistake To Avoid This Week

Assuming your athletes trained over break. They didn’t.

Or if they did, they didn’t do everything you wanted them to.

Even if they did that, they didn’t have you watching their warm-up, strides, and post-run work, so they were likely sloppy with all three.

This reality took me years to accept, but once I did, the athletes I coached ran faster in April and May, which is the goal.

It’s not that kids don’t want to be good - it’s just that even the most serious kids don’t get in great blocks of training over the holidays.

Your Critical Next Steps

Your job is to be smart about the next 7-10-20 days and have the courage to go back to the training they did when you last saw them.

This will keep them healthy. If they are healthy and having fun on Monday, January 19th, they’ll have a fantastic track season.

There’s roughly 14 weeks between January 19th and the first week of May when they’ll run their season PRs. Be honest about what they did and didn’t do over break, and do the right things this week (and the next three weeks) to ensure they’re PRing in May.

And you don't have to take it from me on this one. Last year I said the same thing in January and one of the best coaches in California - think state titles, years of experience, and a great communicator - wrote me and said essentially, "This is exactly what I needed to hear this week. I forget this because I'm excited to get going."

You need to "meet them where they are" this week, and not where you wish they were. If you do that you'll have a team of injury-free runners in two weeks, and a team that's going to have a great track season.

Once you've accepted this reality, then it's time to move into the fun stuff: Training!

The Four Elements of Modern Track Training

The four elements are...

1. A Proper Warm-up
2. Running - Workouts or easy runs
3. Strides - During easy runs and longs runs, or after an easy run
4. Post-run Strenght and Mobility

Let's look at each one..

A Proper Warm-up

You need a warm-up that has your kids moving in all three planes of motion if you want them to stay injury-free. Gone are the days of half-hearted static stretching, a ½ mile warm-up, then the workout.

Here's the one you should use: watch on YouTube or get it on your phone.

Building the Aerobic Engine Running, Race Pace Workouts, or Easy Running

Every track event your kids will run – 800m, 1600m, 3200m – is more aerobic than anaerobic. When I was in graduate school at the University of Colorado in the 1990s, we were taught that the 1600m was a 50/50 mix of the two, and the 800m was an “anaerobic event.” It’s not.

The 800m is 60 percent aerobic, so we need to “build the aerobic engine” all year long for high school runners, regardless of what event they’ll race on the track.

Race pace workouts will start when racing starts, though in the Track Training System we get on the track earlier in the winter than most programs to prepare kids legs for racing. The reason coaches don't have shin splint and lower leg issues with the TTS is in part due to this weekly workout.

Revving the Engine with Strides

Using the analogy of a car, your kids need to “rev the engine” most days they run with strides. And this means that on the first day that you meet them they need to be doing strides.

They’ll run strides as part of their easy days, as well as in the last 15-25 minutes of a long run. If you’re not doing strides the first day of practice - or at minimum the first week - you’re not setting your kids up for those May PRs.

Post-Run Strength and Mobility

Here’s the deal: young athletes will “build their engines” faster than they can strengthen their chassis. My friend Mike Smith, who coached at Kansas State University and now coaches at West Point, introduced me to this concept when I was coaching at the University of Colorado.

“Metabolic changes occur faster than structural changes,” he explained. That’s why he had his college athletes do so much work to strengthen all the components of their chassis.

You can get PDFs with the the Red and Orange post-run routines, as well as the videos with all the exercises here.

The Key Concept: Extending The Aerobic Stimulus

All four elements – Warm-up, Workouts, Strides, Post-run Work – need to be done back-to-back so we can “extend the aerobic stimulus.” We want to keep their heart rate up as long as possible. If there are no breaks between components, we’ll get a long aerobic stimulus with a moderate amount of running.

This is why my system keeps athletes injury-free while helping them run PRs: They get as much or more aerobic benefit from training days as their competitors, but with less running.

Another Key Concept: Keep Hard Days and Easy Days

I keep things very simple with Hard days and Easy days. This works well for several reasons:

• The post-run work is organized this way
• Easy post-run work following Easy days and Hard post-run work after Hard days
• Hard days include “challenging aerobic workouts” and Race Pace workouts on the track
• A long run is a hard day, but so is a 1600m workout with 300s or 400s or 800s

When coaches who are struggling send me their training they almost always have days that I would call "medium days." They are harder than easy days, and are "stuffed" into the week's training. You don't need 3-4 hard days a week to have your kids PR week after week.

The Three Phases of Training

Phase 1: First day of winter training until first day off state sanctioned practice

Phase 2: First day of state sanctioned practice to the first important meet

Phase 3: First important meet to to the last guaranteed meet of the season

It took me a while to figure out that this approach to designing a season's worth of training was better - at least for me - than what I learned in USATF Coaching Education. Maybe I'm just not smart enough for that approach.

Regardless, the coaches who have kids PRing every week with the Track Training System use these three phases to organize their season.

Want The Complete Plan?

I’ve put together Track Training Essentials - everything you need for the first 5 weeks of training. It includes:

• Daily training plans for five different levels of athletes
• Warm-up routine videos
• Post-run work demonstrations
• Progression of strides PDF
• Three workouts for each event (800m, 1600m, 3200m)
• Speed development guide including wicket spacing

Best of all? It’s completely free!

Let’s make 2026 your best year of coaching yet!