Questions of D1 XC/Track Distance former or current runners

Triathlon Forum
1

What was/is your experience with coaching? Understanding that most come from a high school coaching environment where the coach signed up for the extra duty pay and often has little or no coaching experience, what surprised you the most about the coaching you received?

How did they track your running progress/development (software/tools) and was the coaching individualized or was a group mentality of everyone runs x-distance and completes X-workouts at X - splits?

Did you feel you were developed to your potential as an individual or just part of a group?

What form of testing was used to determine your pacing?

Thanks

2

I was in school back in the early 2000’s. I showed up everyday to practice and did what I was told at the paces I was told. There was no 2nd guessing the coach (he had coaching results to have earned that respect). Early on I was just more part of the collective group but as I matured and had more specific goals (for track especially) I felt it became more individual.

Frankly, I wanted to be fast but I also wanted to pass my classes and have a social life so it didn’t make sense to overthink or analyze the training at that time.

3

Early on I was just more part of the collective group but as I matured and had more specific goals (for track especially) I felt it became more individual.
This was the biggest difference entering a competitive college. Anyone running at that level was the best or close to the best at their high school and we got treated like it. To be clear I only ran for 3 semesters before deciding that I wasn’t going to be relevant on the team and was just wasting the team and the coaches time, but this was certainly perpetuated by the feeling that the coaches didn’t give a shit about me vs the top guys on the team. Now in retrospect I didn’t put in the effort to earn that, for a variety of reasons, but I still feel like I wasn’t even given the chance on day 1. Obviously the more distance runners a coach has to work with the more expendable they are and the picker they can be.

This may not have been exactly what you were asking but I guess the point is coaches were 100% results based in my experience and really only tailored the workouts for the top guys.

4

This is >30 years ago (mid 80’s). I don’t recall if our coach had HS coaching in his background. He used the same training plan he had been using since the early 1970’s. No software. No individual training plans. Everyone did the same workout.

Two-a-days Monday through Friday (7 miles easy in AM, then PM workouts that varied - Monday 8-10 mile tempo, Tues/Thurs speedwork, Wed/Fri easy). Race on Saturday. Long easy run on Sunday (typically 20 miles). No days off.

Progress was tracked based on where you finished the Monday tempo runs and how many of the 400’s/800’s/mile/2mile repeats you could hold at sub 5:00/mile pace (usually 7-8 miles of speedwork at that pace) in the Tuesday/Thursday PM workouts. No HR tracking. In addition to the “daily” performance, we did a 4 mile time trial on the track to establish beginning of season seedings on the team (done 1 week before the 1st race of the season). We also had weigh in’s before and after every practice.

There were a fair amount of injuries on the team. Looking back at things, you either thrived w/ the high mileage (100-110/mpw) or were battling injury. Those that thrived did well. I was part of the latter group that battled injuries and after the injuries continued through the 1st two seasons, I finally bagged it knowing I would never be healthy with that training regiment.

I hit my potential after college when I ran “smarter” and healthier on my own.

5

times have certainly changed so I imagine coaching has gradually changed over the years as well since the days when I ran high school and D1 college.

In high school in the late 70’s, I really only ran my last two years but got really good over the summer before my last year. In XC we didn’t really have a team but that was fine because I trained with my track club (Scarborough Optimists) year round. My HS PE teacher was a former Team Canada (hockey) strength coach and was very understanding about my training and would allow me to take off running for PE class every day, getting on 6 - 7 miles each morning. Then after school would run from school to the park where the club worked out, 6 miles, do the workout then get a lift home. Was typically running 90 - 100 miles a week. The workouts we did were group workouts and everyone did the same thing, same goals etc. Lucky for me I thrived in that situation and ran well, 3:52 for 1500, 8:28 for 3k and 5:52 for 2k steeple. I don’t think the coaches really tracked anything other then what the workout was and and kept a log of each workout so they could repeat it the next year.

In college I ran for a small D1 school in Texas, Lamar University and was full ride. I always did what the coaches told us to do and never really questioned it. Our system was similar to Tad’s above, started the season with a 4 mile TT to establish a pecking order. In XC we basically had about 12 guys running and everyone got to run most off the meets, the idea was that you had to place among the top 7 the week before in order to officially run for the school the next week, otherwise you ran unattached and had to try to crack the top 7 to run in the school colors the next week. All of our workouts were group oriented but there was some individualization as in before the workouts the coaches would often let certain individuals know what the expectations of them were for that particular workout. Our coaches then made notes on every workout, splits, observations etc. and always had them available for us to read.
It was a tough system and not everyone is cut out for that. Again luckily I thrived under the system and did well. One of the things our coaches always told us, you can always ask why we are doing a specific workout but don’t question it, its not changing. But for example if I was having a bad workout for any reason, they didn’t hesitate to pull me from the workout when appropriate.
I felt at the time I maximized my potential in college and that the coaching I got was very good.
I continued running the roads after college and continued to improve while being self coached. I stuck to a similar routine that I had used in college but also knew what specific workouts I had done in college that really worked for me so concentrated a bit more on those.
Overall, college was great for me, I got a free education, continued to improve and learned without getting burned out and had minimal injuries. I think my college coaches did a great job and even now 35 years after graduating I still communicate with my college coach thanks to Facebook as he is now living in Sweden. And I still go back to my old college to visit every couple of years and watch the team workout.

6

Actually it doesn’t seem that much has changed, full-scholarship for a D1 top xc school and the coaching seems like its what it was 30 years ago, just go out and run… I’m just amazed that with all the technology available and even just a simple program like training peaks isn’t utilized in any way to track athletes training and performance. Don’t get me wrong, I am sure there are many schools with great coaches that have great programs, but it was pretty sad to see that at that level there was nothing used other than how an athlete performed for one workout or the first meet. That was the only measure of how they were selected to race. The only reason the school remains a top school is because they are great at recruiting top athletes but there is very little if any coaching going on.

7

I coached at a very small high school so my sample size was pretty small, but both of the runners that I sent to college in a four-year span ended up injured in their very first season of cross-country. The first went from 60 to 70 miles per week to 40 with way too much fast running. He also went through a coaching change for the better but his times don’t really indicate that he was faster finishing College than he was when I coached him.

The second, who was my daughter that I had coached for five years, had shin splints and some other nagging problems, in my opinion because of the weight program was not tailored to distance Runners and had no logical progression. Again, my opinion on weights for distances if you do them at all, then they should be developed in such a way that it minimally impacted running. My daughter told me there were times when she was so sore from weights that would kill her work out the next day.

Her coach is a young guy who seemed to know what he is doing but relied too much on the good judgment of the strength coach did not really pay attention to shoes the way I did, obviously because she was my daughter. Plus, he did not really adapt her training at all compared to the rest of the team. When she started, I sent him a pretty detailed synopsis of the type of training in the volume and frequency she was running. As a college coach, I would have looked on something like that as a treasure Trove of good info to help tailor training to the runner. When the first workout schedule came out, her stuff was pretty much the same as every other Freshmen. I will say that her coach is very encouraging and really cares about his people, I just think he treats everyone the same and does not know what to do with an outlier. Even my daughters teammates were surprised at her volume but she has built it up over 5 years and now runs more than anyone on the team, even as a freshman in her first season.

My personal philosophy is that running is not that complicated. The X’s and O’s matter less than learning your Runners Tendencies, paying attention to how they are feeling, and having a 4-year plan.

8

I was fortunate that I ran for one of the best HS coaches in California back in the early 90s. Looking back, the program was pretty simple…nothing fancy, just hard work. Long runs, hills, recovery runs, and hard days. In college, Cal Poly and UC Irvine, the basic elements of the training were the same, only the long runs got longer and the hard days got faster. In HS and college, the training was the same for everyone but both coaches would make individual adjustments to accommodate athletes’ abilities or current fitness level. For instance, in HS if the workout was 10x400 at 70s with 2:00 rest, I was told to do 12x400 at 68s. In college, some guys might go 15 miles for the long run and others might only go 12. Back then, if we kept a log, it was all handwritten.

9

I raced at the university level for a Canadian school but we raced primarily in NCAA D1 and D2 meets. This was also back in the late 90s early 2000s, so there was less in terms of training software to work with (we did do video technique analysis though, and regularly look at HR data).

In terms of our program, we very much had group workouts in season, but the spread between the guys in terms of speeds was fairly small, on workouts there might be 2-3 clusters of guys running a slightly different paces, but all fairly close. In the off-season we were doing more individualized programs. We did have sessions that we did on our own (although often a few of the guys would meet up and do some of these in small groups as well). In terms of track, the workouts were consistent amongst groups (i.e. mid distance, long distance, sprints), although the volume was tailored, so we might all be doing 400m repeats, and the core workout would be 10x400m, but some guys might only be doing 8, and some might be doing 12 (and some might have slightly different target paces), depending on where they were at, or who was traveling that coming weekend to a meet, vs. who wasn’t, etc. I found it a good balance of individualized and group work, and nothing beat those crazy hard track sessions, where you had 6 guys all so close in ability, that you only had to think every 6th rep, because you would take turns leading, and then could just turn your brain off, and follow for the next few reps (it was really only in the last couple of intervals that everyone had to keep their wits about them, because some guys might start to fade, and you might need to bridge a gap, or take over the lead to stick to your target time). In our program I made massive improvements over my collegiate career…

In terms of testing to determine pacing, not sure what you’re getting at here? We did regular races and time trials, to establish where people’s form was at, and the results of these would help and feed the target paces for various individuals on the team. We also did some lab testing (V02 Max, wingate, cunningham faulkner) as well as some field testing (we had this crazy steep hill that we would do annual tests on, both in terms of time, and at what point people had to walk, to better inform what events people should be racing on the track, it alllowed our coaches to estimate the ability of each athlete to cope with and buffer blood lactate). These tests were not at all useful for determining pacing, but they helped establish fitness baselines (which could then be compared to on re-testing in the future), and helped give a better sense of what events and distances each athletes physiology was suited to.

In terms of what I saw from NCAA schools, it varied, coaches have different styles, and it’s important to find a coach who’s style fits you as an athlete… In terms of the teams, from talking to a lot of guys we raced against regularly, if you were a stud, you could pick and choose your events and races, if you weren’t, you typically race more events at each meet, to try and scoop up points for team standings here or there, rather than necessarily focusing on your key events and making big improvements there. Some guys strive in doing that, and then as a sophomore or junior move up to stud status, others run out their whole careers like that. that also varies by school in terms of the stock they put into team placements, but it’s a reality that many athletes don’t understand coming out of HS… I was lucky that I was part of a small canadian school, less focused on point based team standings on the track, because I was an average runner at best, and would have for sure been a worker bee, having to race in many events to scoop up points, being allowed to focus on my individual events and the odd relay, I was able to develop much more as a runner, and start reliably scoring more points in individual events.

In comparison to high school, I was lucky to have excellent high school coaches, with solid running backgrounds, and styles that suited me, I would say our mid-distance coach in HS for track did lack some creativity with his workouts, so they were very repetitive, for XC that was less of an issue, our workouts were always fun, but tough… In terms of at the university level, I was lucky that our coaches style worked really well for me. There were mistakes (my last conference XC champs, we completely pooched our taper, I knew it too, as soon we did our last really big workout a week out, I knew we had gone too deep with too much volume, we still had decent results, but the only guy who ran to his full potential had missed that workout due to injury), but far more hits than misses, big gains, and I learned a ton, that still influences how I train today (despite being older, heavier and much slower these days…).

The key part in selecting a school is to visit the schools, talk to the coaches and some of the athletes on the teams to find something that looks like a good fit…

10

High School:
Track coach split up the team in groups of sprinters, field guys jumpers, field guys weight, and everyone else (middle distance and long distance). For the ‘everyone else’ group standard fare was warm-up, main workout, and warm-down. Raced on Tuesdays, Thursdays (or Friday), and a couple of Saturdays early season and then at state meet. Cross Country coach was the track coach. An assistant coach timed us during workouts. Warm-up was a mile followed by 3-5 strides. Main sets focused on intervals of 400M, 600M, or 800M. Time interval was fluid as it was dependent on last person in, plus 10-60 seconds rest. Main set max of 2-2 1/2 miles total. Warm-down was the jog from the track to the building (about 200M or until the coach stopped looking).

What surprised me the most about the coaching when in high school? Nothing. Didn’t know what to expect and didn’t know enough to think about it. We ran. We raced. We dreamed of making the Olympics.

Running progress was mapped by ourselves if at all. What mattered was place and time in meets, not workouts. Pacing only mattered in the meets. Race results were in three categories: 1.) went out too fast and died, 2.) went out too slow and ran out of real estate to pass everyone else during the kick, or 3.) nailed it. The more nervous and inexperienced runners usually did #1. The pain-adverse and team members running only to earn a letter usually adopted tactic #2. The good runners nailed it.

D1:
Coaches were harder, more in your face, and wanted you to be better. (This happens at really good track high schools as I learned from teammates when in college).

Workouts came out the first of the month, each month from the first day of practice before school started in the fall to after school year since track went beyond finals. We received group specific workouts: sprinters, field guys received specific by event, middle distance, and long distance. Detailed workouts of warm-ups, other intervals, main sets, warm-down, and weights. Tailored interval times based on groups with individuals stratified in one of three groups based on capabilities. I was in the middle group for 3 years (we called ourselves the “Death Squad” as that’s how we felt on the intervals we needed to hit to be moved up to the top runners’ group).

The workouts were designed as cycles of base, builds, race, recover, builds, race, peak race, and recover. No software. All on paper. Intervals were timed at 200 meters with focus on hitting pace for each 200M. Assistant coaches focused on calling out splits. The upper classman either pulled the newbies to quicker pace or scolded us when going out too slow. They taught us on track during workouts. As we aged up in class, we taught the newbies about pace. We were taught to go out quick for 100-200 meters, settle in at max pace targets, then kick for final 200-300M’s. Key workouts were designed this way. No recorded measurements during workouts. We learned pacing from the assistants calling out times and the others in the pack calling us out on either being too quick or too slow. By mid-season the intervals were scarily quiet as we breathed hard but knew we were at pace. Even in cross country the splits on the golf course or actual course were set up for 200 meters when possible and at a minimum 400 meters.

We also did an easy 6 second heartbeat check, then times by 10. Anyone with a HB above 140 was not supposed to go on the next interval. Few did HRM’s. Too much extra distractions taking away from the mental feel of pacing. Some individuals would download splits and review later. Coaches? Never. Again, you can’t do that in a race.

The physical feel of pacing to us was more important than numbers in an app or on a piece of paper. For races, what mattered were the finish times. We developed the feel of pacing followed by desire to win at all costs with our kick. Race times determined pecking order, not workout times. After races, the coach always provided commentary of how each individual did with all 200M splits shown. Good callouts were for PR’s, or SB’s (season best), or qualifying standards meet (NCAA or Olympics in Olympic years). Bad callouts came because of bad pacing of targeted splits not reached.

Finally, in college we were developed as individuals within a group. The grouping changed as we developed (or destructed ourselves) with physical capabilities and mental confidence. Top placing individuals received more individual attention than the team’s MOP’s. I remember one practice the coach came up to the group I worked out in and said hi to everyone in the group by name except me. I looked at a teammate after the coach left and asked: “Do you see me or am I a ghost?” We still laugh about that visit.

The majority of the top track guys were run in too many races, relays, and meets. All to score points for the team. They either burned out or got injured early and quit, went elite before graduating or finally excelled into an elite after graduation. Often, the MOP’s that kept at it afterwards, kept running for years after college since we never got burned out.

What surprised me most about college? How a great coach with a great coaching staff can improve great high schoolers into world class track guys without drugs. How they also can turn good runners into really fast competitors. And how they can motivate runners for life. I still hear my coaches in my head during my workouts and races. I never thought of the sustainability factor of what I learned in college.

Post D1 in Club
Ran four years of club post-college after started my work career outside of any sports. The Club coach was another Olympic coach in a different state. He coached us as individuals within a group too. He focused on splits in workouts and races, like my undergrad coach.

Workouts were given to us daily instead of the start of the month. Other than that, still focused on the cycle phases, pacing, mental tactics, and motivation. Workouts were not as much mileage though many clubmates ran more outside of formal workouts on their own. Just different coaching philosophies. Again, race results were what mattered, not times in workouts. Race results of SB’s, PR’s, reaching qualifying standards, or high placings in bigger meets counted more in kudos.

Coach issued a post meet summary of accomplishments with commentary. Good and bad. All low tech. All motivational.

Not sure why you are asking all your questions. There was definitely a coolness factor on technology when used in D1 and Club. Newer people always liked the new gadgets. Still the coaches rated us the same: by the watch and placings and the pacing that got us there. That’s what mattered.

https://www.palmtreesahead.com/feed
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******

11

Early on I was just more part of the collective group but as I matured and had more specific goals (for track especially) I felt it became more individual.
This was the biggest difference entering a competitive college. Anyone running at that level was the best or close to the best at their high school and we got treated like it. To be clear I only ran for 3 semesters before deciding that I wasn’t going to be relevant on the team and was just wasting the team and the coaches time, but this was certainly perpetuated by the feeling that the coaches didn’t give a shit about me vs the top guys on the team. Now in retrospect I didn’t put in the effort to earn that, for a variety of reasons, but I still feel like I wasn’t even given the chance on day 1. Obviously the more distance runners a coach has to work with the more expendable they are and the picker they can be.

This may not have been exactly what you were asking but I guess the point is coaches were 100% results based in my experience and really only tailored the workouts for the top guys.

Had a very similar experience. Only I realized from day one that however good I was, I wasn’t going to be good enough to do anything for that team. They had 4 guys under 4:10 for the mile. 3 guys under 14:00 for 5k They sure as hell didn’t need me.

But in the first week I had a rare moment of foresight (a very rare one) and I realized right away that I would never, ever get a chance to run with people like that again. So instead of bailing I just put my head down, kept my mouth shut and ran my ass off for 4 years. As long as I didn’t bother anybody, I didn’t get kicked off. I was pretty good for running with guys who were normally fast but who were out of shape due to coming off injury or other long term layoff. I served a purpose in that regard.

In all that time, I was permitted to race only once. And even then, I basically had to beg the coach to let me do it. But it was my senior year so I figured, what the f***

Like you, they didn’t give a shit about me but I was willing to live with that as long as they let me train with the team.

The downside was that I came out of it really sick of running. Four years of burying yourself in every practice (because you suck compared to the people you’re running with) and then never getting to race really killed me instinct and desire to race. Took a long time to get it back.

As far as the coaching in general, it was pretty bad. The coach had a single program of workouts. People did it every year. It often involved things like 4 x 1 mile all out, just a few days before IC4As. Not nearly enough rest. If guys on scholarship were not running well, he would threaten to pull their scholarships if they weren’t running better. One of my friends went through a few months where he was struggling and the coach basically told him, “You’re running with a group of people I just don’t care about”.

I was in that group, of course. I didn’t care but he was a much better runner just having a bad patch. Not exactly inspirational.

The real irony is that almost none of those crazy fast guys runs anymore. I think it really just burned the desire right out of them.