Would it be better to keep everything done in the GPP on grass? Tempo/conditioning of course, but also all the speed work, etc.
Not sure if it is better or not, but I have enjoyed doing most of the GPP on grass. All of my hill work is on grass. The EFE and FEF seems to be better on a track, but I have occasionally done them on grass too.
Last fall, my small group did the hills on pavement. I don’t think it created any problems since the landing surface being inclined limits the stress on the leg since there is such a small distance for the foot to fall and come in contact with the surface. We simply did not have a grass hill that was shallow enough to run on. If we had we would have done the work on grass.
Moving from hill work onto the flat surfaces my guys did the vast majority of this work on the grass and I’m definitely going to do it again this year. I feel like they certainly developed speed and they stayed very healthy. We experienced very few injuries/irritations.
Why not sled pulls?
We did them, initially, on Wednesdays but I deleted them out since I felt they were a bit too intense (even with little to no weight on the sled) for that early in the year. Probably the only incident I can recall from last fall injury/minor strain related came from an athlete doing the sled pulls.
I’d rather just stay with the hills early on and stay off of the flat sprints until weeks into the gpp from here on.
Also decided that I wanted to reserve the sleds for the transition between indoor and outdoor track. 3-4 weeks of sled pulls instead of going back to hill work.