Pre-Season Training

Pre-Season Training (Begins Jan 5)
I've always said that if you want to get somewhere, you need to know how you are going to get there.  Random driving around almost never gets you where you want to go.  Random, unfocused running is better than no running, but nowhere near as good as training with a plan.

Tristan put in huge miles over the winter
and finished his senior year by qualifying
for divisionals.

You are hopefully enjoying your time off from school and getting some good runs in.  I hope that you are following the training guidelines I posted last week.  I'd like to share with you what our running will look like when we return from break. Bear in mind, we will be starting during P.E. class and you are under no obligation to stay after school.  Having put that out there, I also want you to know that the 45 minutes of P.E. class are likely not enough time for you to develop the pre-seaosn fitness that you need.

The next phase of our training, after the re-introduction phase you are currently in, is going to be what I call pre season.  This phase starts the day we return from break and continues until the first day of spring sport practice (Feb 8th).  Areas of emphasis for pre season (in order of importance):

1. Aerobic Endurance
2. General Fitness
3. Speed Power
4. Aerobic Power
5. Anaerobic Power

Aerobic Endurance - For both distance and mid-distance groups, this will be by far the most important part of your pre-season training.  During this phase, we will try for a 3 week block of training where your mileage is 5 miles per week higher than your highest achieved 3 week block leading up to cross country.  For instance.  Garrett had a block during the summer where he averaged 54 miles for a 3 week stretch.  During track pre season period, he will want to try and average 59 mpw.  The distance runs you are doing should be comfortable, but they should not be slow jogs.  If you feel good at the end of a run, feel free to pick up the pace to steady state effort.  The only guideline is that the pace should remain comfortable.  For our top boys, this might be in the low 6 minute range, for our top girls, steady state pace might be in the low 7 minute range.

Some of you may want to run doubles during this period.

Zach built up to 80mpw before opening his senior season with a
track record at Turlock's Joe Delby Stadium

General Fitness
General fitness will still make up only a small portion of your overall training volume, but it will become more important.  General fitness includes things such as: weights, fitness x, core laps, Mando style core, different types of games such as med ball, push ups, sit ups, etc.... You should try for a little bit of general fitness type of stuff after every run.

Speed Power - Speed Power refers to your ability to accelerate to top speed for short periods of time. To help develop Speed Power, you can do strides, ramps for form, ramps to top speed, or even full out 50m sprints on the grass. This type of training is not very specific to the demands of your events, so once we get into the actual season, we won't do a whole lot of this type of training.  During the pre season, you can do speed power stuff 1-3 times per week.

Aerobic Power

Back in the day, Alex
Guerrero ran consistant
50 mile weeks with at
least 1 aerobic power
session per week.
#8 3200 time in USA
Bronze Medal at USAJ 5k
Year 2000

No other factor will determine how well you race as will your aerobic power.  Aerobic Power simply refers to the ability to run at a very high intensity for a long period of time without becoming fatigued.  Because Aerobic  Power is so important to racing, we will start to do a little bit to develop it during our pre-season.  We will try to develop Aerobic Power with as little stressful training as possible.  Some low stress workouts for aerobic power might include:

• Hard surges of 2-5 minutes embedded into a distance run.
• 200m segments at race pace embedded into a steady state run
• Intervals of 600-100m at about 5k race pace with plenty of recovery

We will do no more than 1 Aerobic Power session per week during pre season

Anaerobic Power

Anaerobic Power refers to your ability to run VERY fast for a shorter period of time (up to 2 minutes).  This trait is more important for 400/800 runners, but all of us use Anaerobic Power in ANY track race.  Anaerobic Power does not take very much time to develop and therefore we will not need to work it very much during the pre-season.  The reasons for doing Anaerobic Power during the pre-season is that doing it in small amounts now will prepare us for the longer, tougher anaerobic power workouts later in the season.  Examples during the pre season:

• 5 x 200 at mile RP after a distance run
• 3 x 150 at 800m RP after a distance run

At this time of the year, Anaerobic Power work will only be done as a supplement to the rest of your training.  It should not be stressed pre season.

Conclusion

I decided to post this part of the training plan now, during break so that you can look ahead to what is coming.  If you see where you are going, you should be more motivated to do stuff NOW.  It is unrealistic that you will be able to build to a solid mileage peak in January if you have not run since November.  Remember, the phase we are in now, during break, is called re-introduction.  Make sure to re-introduce your bodies to solid mileage so that when we come back to school, you will be ready to roll.