[i]Originally posted by DaGovernor[/i]
1. "….wouldn't it be best to always attempt to simulate race situations? Conversely, when would it not be advantageous to do so?" What do you think?"
Specificity is key as your post alludes to, but often it is most effective to work on different elements / energy systems in isolation or semi-isolation to achieve the greatest training effect. Typically, I think this should occur earlier in the macrocycle and as the season approaches the various elements should be combined.
2. What time of year would you want to start doing workouts that are faster than race pace? How long (days/weeks) and/or how often (times/wk) do you do these workouts? And if you can, give me a sample workout of it.
This is a tough question to answer because it could be looked at several ways. In one sense, faster than race pace work could potentially be trained from Day 1 with acceleration development. Later in General Prep or early in Special Prep one would obviouly be going faster than race pace with MaxV work (i.e. 10-30m flys). I'm assuming however that you're thinking of interval type workouts (reps of 75m-250m) in which case I think Special Prep (1 maybe 2x / week) is probably the earliest you'd want to start this training for a quarter miler. I think from Special Prep to Pre-Comp (2x / week during pre-comp) the total weekly volume of this type of training should probably increase and as one enters the Competitive Phase it can be held constant or dropped and replaced by more race-pace work.
3. Looking at the training schedule I posted on 1-9-2004 at 01:16 PM, what do you think of it?
I thought it looked fine. The extensive tempo seemed pretty high to me but from what you've mentioned in the past you seemed to like doing longer workouts.
4. 400 told me, ". . . on the Split Runs day, your rest b/t your 200's is a tad too short. I'd say 2-3min running at that pace. Trust me, running that fast, even with a slightly extended rest period, you'll feel the burn and get a good workout." I don't understand why you'd need that much rest in between. I mean I know you'd still feel the burn, but what I mean is, last week in between the 300 splits (150, 150) I only got 30 seconds rest. So are you saying I'd need THAT much additional rest (2-3 min.) by only increasing the rep volume by 100m?
I could be wrong, but my thinking was that each week of my split runs meso I could increase the distance run, and keep the rest the same. Doing that I figured would have me gain more from the workout, if that makes any sense.
I don't necessarily think you need that much rest either but some individuals might. Out of curiosity though are your %s based on effort or race pace. I think your progression by distance is a very logical one and should get the job done. I would only do this however if you were basing your %s off of your PR time. In which case you'd also only want to increase the distance when you could maintain the desired goal splits with the given rest interval.
5. What do you think about the post I made on 1-12-2004 at 09:23 AM?
I'm not sure what you're looking for but when I skimmed through your old posts I couldn't find any weekly plans that had 3 intensive tempo sessions. I saw several that had 2 intensive tempo sessions and as I said before I think that that is just fine. As for the fibre conversion issue, the evidence is still inconclusive. I have however put up a new article[/url] on the site which touches on this very subject.
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