Anyone that knows anything about sports physiology please read this. Let me present you with a hypothetical situation:
Runner A does a hard workout on monday. Every monday the entire year. Essentially it’s the same workout, but with shorter recoveries and more distance added on. Runner A has to work real hard to get finished with the workout because it hurts real bad at the speed at which he completes the workout. It usually takes Runner A until Wedsnday until he is prepaired to do another difficult workout. Now let’s say it gets down to the last few weeks coming up to competetion and he doesn’t want to kill himself doing this workout (This is where the theory starts) so he begins the same workout he did last week, but stops about 1/3-1/4 of the way through. His body, thinking that he was begining another extremely taxing workout, overcompensates, tearing down and building up muscle tissue, and it’s as if Runner A did the whole thing. Except he isn’t all beat up coming into prelims on Thursday. And the week after that, Runner A is still in good shape for sectionals.
Thoughts???
EDIT: Runner A is a half miler