Thanks Kebba for posting the micro’s for your athlete and I always love the names you use in your menus.
Some thoughts on a few things mentioned above-
1) JJ- Great, great thoughts on managing intensities/volumes and going with plan b. I think too often as coaches, we feel like we need to get ‘x’ number of workouts in, in a week. Sometimes we need to look past the 7 day calendar though and maybe use a 10-14 day setup.
2) Keith- In your sample micro, I would also be interested in what you had the Fri,Sat,Sun before that Monday. A good hard comp on that Fri/Sat followed by another weekend of competing, may have different needs. Again, sometimes as coaches, we take what we hear and read from great coaches and see how their weeks are set up and what we don’t often see is what they did the week before. They show us their ideal and ultimate week.
3) Special endurance from meets. We have an early outdoor conference meet (third week of April). We will compete 5 consecutive weekends leading up to that meet, several of those meets are two day affairs. Any type of SE that we get comes from those meets, (most of our people will run 100 and 200 and a 4 x 100 or something like that) during the week, we’re just trying to stay fresh, hit a vmax session and some blocks. The real balance for us, is trying to manage our regional qualifiers, who will have another 6 weeks from conference to regionals. The intensities and volumes for those athletes change to set up the 6 additional weeks.
4) The tempo debate rages on. From what I’ve seen and read from him, Clyde Hart would have a few strong words in support of tempo training in the 80-85% range for 400 runners.
Thanks to everyone for all their thoughts, fun to read and think about.