Charlie said to just train normally and use the 10 day taper as the final hit, so I’m just training normally. The weights are maintenance at this point and I’ve removed squats with the contrast workout. I’ll kill the weights entirely the last 2 weeks or so.
Now, John Smith wouldn’t be “training” at all at this point–nothing more than 6X80 submax and starts/drills, somewhat like what Nikoluski mentioned above. But, when I started with the contrast workouts, I cut the volume way back to avoid injury and didn’t get in any training to consolidate gains and set up something to taper off of. With the high stress of the contrast workout, the training volume does have to be cut down, but now that I can do the workouts more or less normally, I’m getting in that training phase, and I’ll be cutting down the workload to more of a comp load after I’ve had around 3 weeks of “training” as Charlie said somewhere above.
Next year, of course, I’ll have this training in the last few weeks of SPP2 and my training during comp will be as John Smith has it.
One last question
Instead of racing distances in training why not something like 60-80-120 on wednesday and on sunday 60-80 or one hard 120 after the contrast? Just asking b/c I hate to use racing distances training. Mentally I feel if I go into a meet not knowing my time exactly for my distances I feel less stress. If I go in saying I just ran 11.xx in practice so I know it should be 11.xx in a race then if I dont get the time I wanted I get bummed out. On the other hand if I go in knowing my training times have been improving over the distances I use in training I just go in feeling confident b/c my prep has been going well… I know it sounds the same or maybe even crazy
There’s a section in one of Verkhoshansky’s papers where the prof mentions that after you’ve done your SPP-type work, you can still improve by doing the competition distance in training or doing competition-style training (in one of the papers he has short-long this way). Obviously, you can’t do the race distance in training if your competition distance is 10000 meters, but you can with 100 or 200, and Clyde Hart has this for 400 (actually 320 for Clyde). I start in the beginning of SPP2 with 2X3X80 (same parameters Charlie gave for Ben) and through the phase move this up to 100, then a single 120 effort–classical short to long, I think.
So in the 2nd half of a SPP I have competition distances in training. It might only be one rep in a speed workout (5X50+100 or 2X40+2X30OS+100) but it’s in there. Notice all the sessions of 3X60 or 4X60 that Charlie has in his short-long SPP1.