Elitetrack: Sport Training & Conditioning

In about three weeks my school track team will start practicing, and I’m wondering how to train AROUND it. I want to keep my annual plan intact, but these coaches have no idea what they are doing. A practice consists of a static stretch for warming up, 1000m jog, then breaking off into event groups. The sprint group literally spends its practices every day just sprinting 100m or going on 30 minute runs. It’s ridiculous. There is an event group for each event, which should I go to? I really want to run school track to win confrence, but it just seems like a waiste of two hours a day and interferance in quality training.

There have been a lot of posts on this topic in the past and a lot of good advice was given then.  I would suggest possibly seeing if you could sit down and talk with them and let them know that you have been following this training plan and that you have done your homework and is there anyway you could do your own workouts there or possibly humor them and do some of there workouts but mainly yours on certain days?  Not sure if that would be affective or not but its worth a shot maybe?  If you are stuck doing 100m sprints, you could work on different parts of that 100m race if you are sneaky enough.  Maybe you just work on getting out hard for 30-40m and relax and chill the rest or if you want to focus on top speed add a fly in there and just coast/relax last part?  For 30 minute runs, I doubt they are on the track so maybe you could put some sort of tempo or farlek in there and not actually run for the 30 minutes.  Or use first and last 5 min for warmup and do the tempo/fartlek type workout in there?  Just an idea.

Eric Broadbent - 26 February 2012 06:26 PM

There have been a lot of posts on this topic in the past and a lot of good advice was given then.  I would suggest possibly seeing if you could sit down and talk with them and let them know that you have been following this training plan and that you have done your homework and is there anyway you could do your own workouts there or possibly humor them and do some of there workouts but mainly yours on certain days?  Not sure if that would be affective or not but its worth a shot maybe?  If you are stuck doing 100m sprints, you could work on different parts of that 100m race if you are sneaky enough.  Maybe you just work on getting out hard for 30-40m and relax and chill the rest or if you want to focus on top speed add a fly in there and just coast/relax last part?  For 30 minute runs, I doubt they are on the track so maybe you could put some sort of tempo or farlek in there and not actually run for the 30 minutes.  Or use first and last 5 min for warmup and do the tempo/fartlek type workout in there?  Just an idea.

Thats probably what I’ll end up doing. If we do 100m’s consecutive days, I’m fast enough that if I’m doing intensive it would be a sprint for everyone else. Once I find out who the coach is I might email him on this.

I’d recommend showing up with an open mind.

You claim to know that the coaches have no idea what they are doing.  And you claim to know what the only two workouts are.  Then you admit you don’t even know who the coach is.  Callam is right: try keeping an open mind.  Not everything someone else tells you is accurate.