A 400 girl I coached through high school is now a freshman at a D2 college. Her HS marks were 26.8 and 59.1. A typical tempo workout last year was 8X200 @ 70% (39 sec.) with 75 to 90 seconds rest.
She has trained with her college team for about a month, running two or three times a week. She just told me that this Monday they are expected to run “between 20 and 30” 200s at 35-36 (= 75%) with 60 seconds rest. Is this reasonable or useful?" I doubt it is even possible. What do you all think? She is a hard worker, but this seems a bit much. I told her to do as many as she can, but not be embarrassed when she cannot continue. BTW the school’s top runner was at 57.9 last season.
I think reading the lactate threshold thread is more work than running 30x200 @ 75% w/ 1min rest
Anyway, I think vedette is in a Jane Project situation. Train someone well for a while then they go off to college to get wrecked. Nothing you can do.
Well, I actually have read the entire lactic threshhold thread – more than once. And I think she would agree that I did well by her. But her career is now out of my hands, other than providing some moral support.
The next step is to get the school coach to read it. Two coaches who developed both male and female Olympic finalists and low 44sec male and high 49 sec female performers never used a session like that. While tempo vols approached two thirds of this coach’s low end, that was done with top performers, not a barely sub 60 sec girl.
From my own experience, I worked with a girl who ended up running high 56sec after work so tough that she got a pelvic stress fracture requiring her to stay off the track for a full year. Why in the hell did anyone give such a load in the first place and how could so much yield so little performance??
After returning to a volume of a fraction of what you’ve described, she ran in the 52s- that’s her on the GPP DVD/download by the way.
Another girl I worked with was frustrated with track as a junior and took from Sept 1983 to March 1984 off. That’s a hell of a bind leading into the Olympics!!
I told her there was no point even worrying about her general aerobic work- she’d done plenty in previous years and that we’d do a S-to-L program leading into the games. She improved first her 100 and then her 200 performances and worked up to a 400 at the nationals to show fitness, another 400 two weeks out from LA where she set a national junior record and finally LA, where she ran a 50.22e split on the relay as part of our 3.21.21 Olympic Silver performance.
I thank you all for your thoughts. I know this proposed workout is absurd - destructive rather than productive. This girl is like a daughter to me and I worry for her like a parent. But obviously I cannot put myself between her and her college coach. As a freshman, and a non-scholarship one at that, she can hardly be telling the coach how he should train them. My hope is that she misunderstood the proposed workout, or that the coach will quickly realize that the workout will not work out. I may hear from her after Monday, so maybe I will have something to report.
Hi Charlie,
how long did it take her to go from a 56 to a 52?
(p.s. quite a few cases in my city… there are girls (and guys…) training 12 times/week including weights, getting many times injured in the meantime, and the best they ever do is go from a barely sub 60" performance to nothing better than 56 in the end…
The “funny” part is that these athletes are skipping classes and prolonging their college education for years and years (education is free), in order to train (these many times/week). What for, really?
Maybe a handful will get some money’s worth, all the rest will just quit frustrated and then proceed to complete their college tasks in their mid-late twenties…
The “mental fatigue” coming from seeing this situation over and over, exceeds the physical fatigue of actually doing it… )
I guess, it’s a vicious cycle for the athletes, Stef. But the problem is that they don’t know better -by they, I mean the coaches What surprises me the most is that they don’t change anything despite the lack of whatever success they deserve. The latter goes for the athletes to some extent, but even more so for the coaches!
Actually if a girl is coming into school with a pr of 60 or just under, and in 4 yrs time she is running 56 that is quite an improvement.
Your looking at roughly 1 sec per season.
When you take into acount the social,and academic problems that come with young college athletes, You quickly come to the realization that there are no quarentees.
It’s not an improvement, to me, when you’re pretty much “living” on the track, sacrificing education and social life, and then being pretty much handicapped when you run that defficient 56.
Perhaps for a college athlete in the States it is improvement, sure… But I’ve had friends coming from 63’s, and while partying four years in college, dropping down to a 56…
That to me is again, mediocricy… Considering how much faster they could be.
Coaching is just “another job” when you settle with just ANY improvement, in my opinion… Best coaching comes when full potentials are reached.
And so far, a scary amount of coaches out there are WASTING human potential…
Jerry and Stefanie: I don’t think you can look at an 18-yr-old’s 400 time and know what her potential is without knowing anything about her. For an athlete who trained hard and well in high school, I think an improvement of 4 seconds in college would represent great progress. If a girl went from 63 to 56 while partying all the time in college, I would say that she was either a very late developer or one who didn’t apply herself in high school. In my girl’s case (coaching her for 4 years) I would say that reaching 56 would be a great achievement and one that would well satisfy her. 55 would put her over the moon. But we can all agree that she isn’t going to get close to that if her coach just beats the hell out of her.
One thing is certain in all this: If the athlete is NOT capable of advancing beyond 56 sec, there is no way they are capable of handling 20x200m- let alone 30x 200
Stefanie, I’m speaking in general terms. I don’t doubt the situation you are refering to seems to be a disaster.
Vendette, I agree each individual brings a different case history to the track. Some kids come from big time H.S. programs and have been run into the ground. College improvemnt is then limited. Others are diamonds in the rough,having come from small schools where track is just an afterthought. Once they hit the college scene they explode.
