Failed Seasons (Read 735 times)

I never ran cross country so take this for what it's worth but it looks like a matter of simply peaking too early. You may be someone who gets into racing shape very quickly and then de-trains quickly as well. Early in the season you were doing 2 workouts a week and racing at least every week. And you had a nice progression going. It's hard to sustain that for more than 4-6 weeks. Whatever you do, talk to your coach about it but that's what it looks like from here. If that's the case you'd want to do less intensity early in the season and run the first few races more coservatively, to try and peak later in the season next year.

You don't really need to taper for a 5k race. Your workouts should change to shorter/faster intervals, but aside from that, you shouldn't drop mileage more than 10-25%, and that should only be the week of the race. If you drop mileage by large amounts like you have been doing, your fitness will degrade and you will end up running stale.

MikeyMike and Hannibal: I am very impressed, as always with your posts, with the replies from both of you. Aces: Peaking is all about balancing your speed and stamina. If one starts to come up too quickly, and if it's too early, as Japanese coaches/runners would say, you'll need to "put the cap on" over your speed to slow down. The way to do it is to go for a long easy jog. What you need to do is to draw a line from the first race of the season to the final race (state?); and pick a REALISTIC target goal time (don't just throw a time of, say, 15:00 and continue to push). For example, if you can "comfortably" start the season with, say, 17:45 and you want to shoot for 16:45 (I'm just throwing some bogus numbers to make it easy to understand). So that's 60 seconds improvement throughout and, once again I'm throwing some convenient number here, if you have 6 races throughout the season to achieve that; then you know you'll need to improve 10 seconds per race. So if, say, you ran the second race of the season in 17:10, you'll know you are jumping a bit too much. Your speed is coming back too quickly. So you'll need to "put the cap on". Go easy on sharpening and go for a long jog. And see what happens in the next race. This is why you just cannot simply follow a schedule blindly. You need to understand why you're doing certain workout and what it's doing to you and where you are and what you want to do. Craig Mottram's coach (or I should say, former coach), Nic Bideau sent me an e-mail after World Cup where Mottram beat Bekele. He said (I can't remember the exact dates) that he had some injury problem and didn't do much speed work for a while. Then when he came back, because he tried to catch up, he did one interval sesson too fast. Then he set PR in 1500m but it was too early; he ran terribly in the following 3000m. So they decided NOT to do any fast running and staied away from track and did lots of long runs and steady state runs. I think he said something like he did only one track workout before World Cup which was 3000m time trial with a few 200s thrown in afterwards. You see, you need to evaluate what's happening and change the workout, if necessary, as you go along. Also, both of those guys, as well as some others, said it; you'll need to do a lot more jogging in between. Don't buy into some of the crap you see elsewhere; you can do 3 hard quality workouts a week and throw away "junk miles". I just sent in a piece of article to Japan Running Academy annual publication on Peter Snell's training (Lydiard). I sent them 3 weeks workouts leading up to Tokyo Olympic 800/1500 double. But added a note that he "jogged an hour every morning" to matinatin his aerobic capacity. Throughout the racing season, they always kept up with weekend's long run though the pace would come down (get slower). You need to ALWAYS think about balance.

Aces: not EVERY single run has to be hard. Nothing would help you better than going out for a nice easy jog. If you feel sluggish and bad, walk. Just get out and move around. If you feel too worked up, wear pants and even jacket just to slow down. I was talking to Rod Dixon, 1983 NYC marachon champion, a few years back and he told me that, after a race in Europe, if he felt his adrenaline is still rushing the following morning, he would wear pants to the jog to slow him down. Add as much "junk miles" as you can, the morning of the race even, afterwards in the evening, next morning, etc. It will do you good; believe me.

Thank you much for your inputs. My log is accurate, and that mileage reduction was due to a race where I was not feeling good+sickness+the high resting heart rate. My coach thought that resting would be the best thing. Also, yesterday was sectionals, so my season is over...

Too bad your season is over. The good news is that you are only a junior in HS and have another XC season as well as 2 more track seasons to look forward to not to mention college and beyond if you decide to keep with it. You can't help or change what happened in the past, but you can learn from it and prevent the same thing from happening in the future. Talk to your coach now about what you should be doing in the off-season and then how you want your season to progress, If he seems receptive you might even want to show him this thread. This talk should be a discussion between coach and athlete who both have some input, not coach as dictator or athlete as know-it-all. From the tone of your posts here you don't seem like that kind of person and your coach almost assuredly wants the best for you, so if you approach him respectfully I'm sure this can be a fruitful discussion.

Looking at your log the first thing that jusmps out is that you cut your overall mileage way to much at the end of the season. You have only once gone over 20 miles in a week the last 5 weeks, with most of that mileage coming in the form of intervals and races. A 5K is roughly 90% aerobic and that needs to be the vast majority of your training even during the peaking stages of the season. What you have done lost most of that aerobic base you had built up over the summer from just easy running. It is no wonder that your resting heart rate is elevated b/c you are running hard a lot and without the continuing aerobic work you are losing the ability to recover from the hard work so you are just digging yourself a deeper hole in terms of recovery. At 40-50 miles per week there is absolutely no good reason to reduce overall mileage much at the end of the season, because it costs you too much in terms of lost aerobic ability...

Excellent post here as is most everything else that has followed from a most knowledgable group. You struck oil when these people chose to respond. Now all you have to do is listen and apply it. Try not to just zero in on one part and forget the rest; read through everything.

Yeah i understand those points, thanks again everyone. I plan on showing this to my coach and getting input. I'll relay that to on here

One point in your coach's defense, he was likely trying to balance the volume of races and those demands with training to allow you to race well with such a busy race schedule. Five weeks just seems a little long to keep this up and expect improvements to continue. I notice your times didn't just get worse at the end though, but throughout most of the season after the first 3 races or so (but we have no idea what the courses were like, this is CC after all). This indicates there is more to it than the mileage cut at the end of the season.