One of the best posts in a great thread 
Thank KK,
So they’re all HARD session :eek:
that’s great, I’ll have to take more time for some workouts i guess.
It just seems so hard to run that fast on training.
my fastest 300 in training was a 36.6, and in comp 34.2.
I am sure it’s the weather that’s holding me back. 
But again thanks for the great reply, i’ll try to work along your guidelines.
Ooops, I missed this one…
I am sure this isn’t a real question of yours… 
It doesn’t directly target your concerns/suggestions of a previous post, but at least it’s an attempt to talk about females’ physiology and how this can affect training cycles and/or performance (i.e., mainly vs. their OMC).
I just suggested some relevant reading; as a friend of mine frequently says “I am only trying to help…” 
Shall I conclude you didn’t find it much of a help? Or you were never concerned with similar issues?
Thanks!
PS I can always wait for the answers in that e-book of yours!
Niko, actually the agony question was real. I just don’t have the time to trawl books, articles etc - and to begin with, actually find them in the first place - in the hope that there will be something pertinent to my specific issue.
Got to be honest, the more time I spend reading, the less I spend thinking (deliberating).
Maybe the fact women and some men can race the tournaments very well, relatively soon after a one-off grand prix 400m, has to do with the way men and women tend to race 400m .
From some experience, more top women tend to race 400m a little more evenly. A differential of under 2sec is quite common - or at least it was when I was closer to actually coaching women who had a chance of making Olympic finals. The last female athlete of that calibre came to me a decade ago now.
I suppose PJ would be able to provide telling statistics to support or refute that idea on the contemporary scene.
In the Melbourne scenario, I think also the women went from a heat direct to a final. Not sure, but can’t recall an intermediate round. But for men it’s always at least three rounds and usually four in a major tournament.
Still that doesn’t really help to explain why none of the Melb GP male competitors had the juice left to get past the second round of the Melbourne CWG?
would like to go back and review just how many 400m races the like of clinton hill actually had this season could have been a case of a few to many…
i think t lewis may have suffered the same fate in the womens she just seemed to have nothing when it mattered over the past 2 weeks…
Lewis was all talked-out :rolleyes:
its a pity think she just drifting out there waiting for something to happen…
needs some strong direction and coaching apart from fam ties
KitKat and others,
it would definitely be good if PJ could provide any performances and the time point these were achieved before major championships -and at a “more normal” time of the year.
[Semi-finals took place though (3 rounds in total, that is)].
Although a young athlete chasing the Olympic and World Champion -already from the semi- is a huge motive, it would be more realistic and informative getting the overall picture, yes!
If I am not mistaken, from PJ’s previous posts a more even pace is still a good practice within a tournament/in a final, but as you say it doesn’t answer the question…
PJ, or anyone else who could provide such info?
Question for KK:
As you have stated somewhere earlier in the thread, your 44" male ran times of 10.47el and 20.49el as an 18 year old.
I’m not sure what times he was running over the quarter at the same age, but many coaches I’m sure would have pushed him toward a career in the short sprints. What made you decided he was more suited to the 400m?
not wanting to give to much away about KK’s man but as an 18 year achieved results in the quarter that are freakish…
It’;s an easy question to answer: I was not coaching him at that age. By then he had already had two strongly credentialled coaches and was into a third, a man who pushed him terribly hard to the point that he was injured almost every summer with severe tendonitis behind both knees and/or a torn hamstring.
So when he came to me it was only in January of 1988, although I had helped him rehabilitate his injuries the previous couple of years because his coach used to say to him it was his own fault he got injured, “go away and come back when you are fit to resume training”!
I have to assume that was correct because it seemed he was following my directions to rehab the injuries and the other guy was invisible for weeks on end.
When he came to me he was in poor shape. He had already agreed to have a race in February of 1988 and so he went and competed, beaten by a schoolboy and ran only 47.1sec. From there we prepared very well for the Olympics for the 400m and he ran nearly three seconds faster, off the precise program I have been feeding into this thread.
I worked with him on and off for seven years and in that time, because of his history of soft tissue injuries and also a double stress fracture in one foot (with his former coach), I decided to protect his career at 400m rather than risk everything on the possibility he might run fast for 200.
Because that meant staying injury-free and I can tell you this guy was high physical maintenance.
Ask Charlie, he had to massage him in Cologne in 88 just to get him back from an injury he had carried for the previous year which nobody seemed able to fix with all their ray-gun zappers and other :rolleyes: expensive toys.
It is partly because of Charlie’s :eek: kindness at that time - and his supreme advice to me on program theory and tapering - that I was able to make my coaching breakthroughs at the Olympic Final strata and so I remain a loyal friend to this day. kk
Phew,
I just came back from training doing the 300+4x60 …150+1x60 session, tried to do it as KK suggested, so here what happened.
Man that’s Hard, luckily the weather wasn’t too bad, little rain but more than 8 degrees.
but it was the fastest training i did ever, going full effort is some dort of a mental thing. I never ran a sub 37 in training, at best we ran 300’s in 38.5. and would have been end of april or may.
I was really afraid at going out full the first 50 meters. the first 60 after a long rep is really hard, I jogged to the 60 line turned and ran. that would make a 40sec break, i know 10s too long. But it was really hard. The next60’s with walk back were going much faster(.4-.7s)
After that i thought i was going to die, but after 10 minutes my heart freq was already back at 130, after 16 to 120. But i still felt out of breath. After 18 minutes i decided to walk to the 250 and just run. To my surprise it felt (relatively)good.
maybe i did have too long breaks I can’t tell.
But for a first time full out running on training i am ok with the times i ran and the way I feel.
my legs didn’t hurt as much as i expected.
When i did the 2x3x200 my ass was really hurting on the last rep. But that could be due to the longer rest.
KK, thank you for your great comments. I would never have tried this kind of workout before.
:eek: KK, I bet there were times you wondered what may have been if you had been training him from scratch.
Hi John,
We are the sum of our life experiences. Maybe the mistreatment made him the tough bastard he became on the training and competition track.
What I know is that by the time he asked me to take him on, he was quite a mature young man in many respects, already for instance a veteran international traveller with a high degree of independence.
What he craved was a greater degree of freedom to determine his own path.
I told him there is no freedom without personal responsibility.
On that basis we worked together for about seven years in total, in a partnership based on mutual respect.
Every session was planned together. I set out the mattrix, the timeline the nature of the work, the structure of sets and sessions. Together we determined the velocities and all recovery times. We created the general preparation phase well in advance. The work never really varied from season to season.
The transition phase and the training during competition phases was often prepared only a week or two in advance, which I believe enabled us to be more responsive to his level of fitness at the time.
It was a partnership in the true sense. I regarded him as a friend as I do to this day, and we tried to get the job done with the minimum of pain, taking every shortcut, avoiding training which could not be intellectually justified as being directly productive along the performance corridor.
We had zero financial support to train. He relied on his family and lived at home during the most productive years of our coaching relationship.
But under circumstances where the only income is generated by race winnings and a return ticket to Europe for the circuit (once he was on the national team bound for some major championship), the pressure on both of us became very difficult. I quit before he did. kk
and with that responsibility comes the consequence of decisions and actions.
I haven’t had the situation you had in terms of coaching but have taken over from bullies / control freaks in business and it is interesting to see how different people respond. Most thrive yet others struggle to adapt.
Sure there are different types of 400 runners. Well documented and you must have observed yurself that while most great 400m runners are also very good 200m sprinters, you also get successful 400 runners who have come down from the 800m.
Cuba’s 1976 Montreal 400m and 800m Olympic gold medallist Alberto Juantorena, even Czech Jarmila Kratochvilova although her excursions into 800m racing were rare - she won the inaugural 1983 world 400 title in Helsinki in a WR 47.99 shortly after setting the 800m WR which still stands.
Regarding knee-lift: It is normally achieved as an elastic response to track contact.
In the 400m there is a tendency to be conservative in most aspects of racing.
But in the supremely conditioned 400m sprinter a high knee-lift and, more importantly, the establishment and then maintenance of a wide angle between the hamstring of the free leg and the quadricep (thigh) of the grounded leg at toe-off can be achieved.
Sprinters including Quincy Watts, Steve Lewis, Danny Everett, Butch Reynolds were noticeable for their high-stepping action, and the ability to maintain a relatively open angle from hammy-to-quad right to the finish line was a distingushing feature of Michael Johnson’s 400m performances.
The mental aspects of racing and training are very important and there are better people than me on this forum to give you answers.
Mostly it is about focus and on what your focus.
If quality in training is important to you, then it sometimes helps if you visualise the performance before you execute the run. That can extend even to imagining (vividly) a crowd in the stadium, rivals in nearby lanes.
Part of the mental matters involved in all of your training and racing relate to a sequence of factors, the most important of which is: INSPIRATION, which is the precursor to DESIRE, which is the precursor to MOTIVATION .
And others can take it from there. kk
Question for the biology buffs;
Is fatigue caused by the decrease in pH (increased acidity) of the muscles as a result of lactate accumulation, or is the exhuastion of ATP the cause?
Lactate accumulation has most probably nothing to do with fatigue; on the contrary it seems to help with muscle contraction force. Nor the increase of H+ as it was later believed -it’s only natural to have such an increase along with that of lactate.
The accumulation of potassium (K) as a result of muscle contraction is more likely a cause.
Thanks for the quick response Nik.
Would you mind expanding on your post? My cellular biology is lacking.
Any chance you could post references?
Nielsen O., Paoli F., Overgaard K. Protective effects of lactic acid on force production in rat skeletal muscle Journal of Physiology 2001, 536 (1), 161-166
Pedersen T., Clausen T., Nielsen O. Loss of force induced by high extracellular [K+] in rat muscle: effect of temperature, lactic acid and b2-agonist Journal of Physiology 2003, 551(1), 277–286