My brother is an assisant coach for a HS CC team. The head coach is ~75yo and has been coaching at the school for 38 years. Here are the workouts they did the first two weeks of practice. (My brother has no control over this)
Monday: AM 5k TT
PM 75min Fartlek
Tuesday: 60min Road Run at 7:00min pace
Wed: AM 2x1.5mi 2x1mi 2x800m
PM 20x200m with 200m jog in between
Thurs: 3x2mi goal time 11:40 through the CC course (big hills)
Friday AM 75min RR
PM 16x400
Saturday:16x800m Monday: AM 6x1mi PM 20x100m drills(strides, high knees, etc) + 3mi run at 6:30pace Tues: 8mi road run at 7:00pace
Wed: AM 10x1000m on CC course (big hills) PM 7mi Fartlek
Thurs: 16x400m on track
Friday: 5K TT plus 30min “shake out” run
Saturday 10mi RR All workouts had 1mi warm up and cool down.
For those of you counting it was ~140mi in two weeks of mostly speed work. As you can imagine there were a couple of injuries.
This is really quite insane when you look at it from face value; however I don’t know how experienced these kids are. Pretty unbelievable for the first two weeks; what about the kids who hardly ran all summer—how does this coach fend off the injuries? My CC coach in high school was a 2:11 marathoner and brought us to winning a division I state title; and we never ran that kind of mileage…Hell some college x-c teams don’t even hit that.
WOW!!! we were barely hitting 35 miles a week in high school with one speed day a week and we were AAA (out of 3) state champs. i really don’t see the logic behind sooooo much speedwork so close together, especially at this point in their season. i could see doing alot of the short speed oriented stuff around late october/early november but not in august
Well the guy has been coaching for 38 years so he must be doing something right otherwise I am sure he would have been fired by now. What are the stats of the team like? Is the team good year after year?
Well the guy has been coaching for 38 years so he must be doing something right otherwise I am sure he would have been fired by now.
Yeah right. Unless you are talking football, baseball, and basketball most places are probably begging for anyone that would step up to coach anything.
The college CC runners that I know run more quantity, but not nearly that much quality. Most of their AM runs are social affairs at conversational pace and somehow they manage to turn out sub 25:00 8k’s.
Sounds like this coach is old school in a bad way. The “No pain, no gain” mantra dies hard.
There are a few had never run a mile before practice started. How does he fend off injuries? He calls people who complain wimps and tells them to suck it up. The track is named after him, so its kind of hard to get rid of him.
Good coaches are so important. I have certainly had my share of bad bad bad coaches in both HS and college.
freshman year of HS - had a track coach who told the whole girls team on the first day of practice that he had just finished reading a book about the US women’s 1984 volleyball team and “they trained so hard they all lost their periods. That’s how hard I want you guys to work.” 6 months later I fractured my hip.
college - was on a varsity team (not running) with an outrageous head coach. he broke every NCAA rule i know of from betting on collegiate sports to the # of allowed training hours per day. it’s the only team i’ve ever seen where body fat went up and fitness went down during a season. at the end of the season, girls’ 3 mile run times, max bench, sit-up max, etc. were all worse than when they came in from the off-season! we had people taking anti-depressants and anti-anxiety drugs because of him. we saw a sports psychologist and a team psychiatrist one hour a week each as a team. injured/sick girls were forced to race against doctors’ orders and against their will. i saw a lot of girls ruin their bodies with un-recoverable injuries, suffer huge losses to their self-confidence that continue to haunt them today, and shrug off the opportunity for a good education b/c they were so intent on winning the coach’s approval.
i understand that most HS coaches are minimally paid and generally coach out of their love for the sport. but, i think that they need to be educated and also over-seen by a competent athletic director. I hope that your brother is able to assert himself in some way before the school has lawsuits on their hands.
Wow, that is a lot especially considering where it is so early in the season and some of those kids probably didn’t run much over the summer or maybe even decided to go out for the team at the start of the school year. I coached two years of HS track and cross-country when I first got out of college and had them do one day of good quality track workouts and another day of tempo work on the roads per week, the rest of it was easy distance. Those type of workouts/mileage look more appropriate for college, and even then it seems like a lot of speedwork for so early in the season.
Slutten is the man. Look at the sweet runner he turned me into!
How many days did you make it before you got hurt? 2? 3? I have no doubt he is the reason I still have knee problems.
“As you can imagine there were a couple of injuries.”
And I would be there will be more to come. In my experience, some coaches and, for that matter, some teachers, view each new season/school year as a continuation of the last year. The thinking is that the kids have been running so there should be no problem. I’ve seen it too many times to count.
Also, the intensity of the workouts is insane. Everyone knows that rest is an important part of training. Your brother is in a tough spot. Can he talk with the coach? Can he express his concern for injuries on the team? Maybe he can ask the coach to explain what the reasoning is for these workouts and if this is how he always has done it. Unfortunately, by the time some of the kids come down with injuries, it will already be too late but then the door is open to speaking with the athletic director.
The coach runs the team like Norman Dale. Its my way or the highway. “We’ve been doing it this way for 38 years and I don’t see any reason to stop now” I wish I could convey to you how grumpy and intimidating this coach is. In four years of CC and track I got exactly one “good job”. One in four years. The AD is in a hard spot, it hard to get rid of a guy who has had so much success and has old alumni ready to back him up. Kind of like JoePa at Penn St. The freakin track is named after him! The AD knows what’s going on. A freshman class of 350 has 4 or 5 guys out for CC.
I went out for CC with this coach my junior year. I was a bike racer . . . never ran distance. Only running was in wrestling practice – short. First week of practice I pop my bursa sack on a 6 mile run, about 1/2 way through the workout. Coach is following the group in the car. Makes me finish. Makes me try and run for a week before I give up and tell him no more. At which point he doesn’t believe I am really injured and thinks I am a world-class wuss. Finally went to an ortho about 2 weeks later who diagnosed and told me my season was over (probably because I hadn’t rested it at the onset of the injury). This coach was such an ass that I was too afraid to tell him what the doctor said, so I hung out with the team as a manager for a couple weeks until I finally got up the courage to just quit.
This is really scary. I hope that something changes.
I’m sure there are plenty of local othropedics and PTs that would back up your brother’s claim that this coach is a nut. unfortunately, alumni and “community” hold a lot of sway, and my experience with the athletic director-coach relationship is that it tends to be a boys’ club type mentality where both are out-of-touch with reality and will back each other up til the end of time.
in my college coach-from-hell experience, the only thing that got rid of him was the threat of a lawsuit, and even then, he was allowed to finish out the season and “retire.”
**And if you haven’t run all summer you have no business trying out for the XC team. **
I disagree. This is high school, not college. This is when some kids find out who they are, what they enjoy. My nephew called me up about 2 weeks prior to a 10 mile race in July and asked me if he could come along with us. I said “sure, do you know how far 10 miles is?” Not only had he not prepared at all, he actually had to borrow a pair of shoes from my boyfriend on the morning of the race. He won his age group. We convinced him to keep the shoes and tryout for the xc team.
Its not like he’s a couch potato. He went on a world tour with an all star soccer team 2 years ago. He skateboards and surfs. He wasn’t “training”, but he results for the race look pretty good…kj
I don’t see this program as too out of line with what a top highschool XC team should be doing with its upper classmen at this point in the season. The early part of XC should be all about peak volume and long aerobic intervals and Tempo/Fartlek work.
The basics are all there: First Week - 2 X 70min plus runs on Mon pm and Fri for volume (probably fartlek in this case means a few pick ups during a distance run), 2 Recovery runs on Tues and Friday, a structured workout of longer aerobic intervals (probaly 10mile pace desending to 10K pace) on Wed & a semi hard XC workout on Thurs (again apears to be roughly 10mile to 10K pace). I would probally drop the 16 * quater on Friday pm, no need for VO2 max work at this point, and assign fewer rythme 2’s Wed pm for runners who won’t be around 16:30 or so in season. Sundays are total rest days, probaly a good thing in highschool.
This is very good training, how highschool cross teams should train. It may not work for kids who goofed off all summer rather than building mileage and laying down a solid base, but those are the kids who should be cut not accomodated.
That said this type of schedule would really only be appropriate for juniors or seniors with a year or two of previous developement under there belts and average to above average talent (17:30 as underclassmen or better) and not underclassmen.