Some observations of the more tempo based training setups:
*Athletes with very good speed coming in to the program seem to do very well (i.e. Michael Johnson, Brandon Couts, Kelly Willie of 2004, etc).
*Athletes seem to progress very rapidly initially and then stagnate somewhat.
*Michael Johnson appears to be a huge exception to the rule.
*With the exception of Michael Johnson, very few have excelled at the international level at anything under 400m (and none under 200m) despite having TREMENDOUS sucess at the 400m race.
*Baylor has been getting practically ALL (as in an almost total monopoly) of the top 400m high school runners for the past 3-4 years. It will be interesting to see if given the top talent how many of the athletes will progress to an elite level.
*The guideline may not necessarily be what their top end speed is (i.e. raw 100m numbers) but how they trained previously. If they were short sprinters at some point previously then perhaps they will have enough speed work in their system to run just fine with a tempo-based program.
*Tempo work although slower is probably more similar in training stimulus to all-out sprinting than other alternative means (weights, plyos, etc.) and it permits much higher volumes to be trained than higher intensity activities.
ELITETRACK Founder