As we get further into the summer, we're going to start doing some faster pace workouts that stress your ability to deliver oxygen to your muscles.
A very standard entry level workout might be written something like this
4 x 3 minutes @ 90% + 4 x 200 @ 100%.
In short, the 3 minute intervals would be designed to lower the oxygen levels in your muscle cells for 12 minutes in order to stimulate your cells to make adaptations that will allow them to use more oxygen in the future.
The faster 200m repetitions would be designed to make you efficient at your maximum speed without being overly exhausting.
Please watch the video I've created for more details before tomorrow's workout.
After 2 "false starts" we finally get to start meeting, for real. We have permission from everybody, but we're still going to obey physical distancing guidelines. So, everything that applied for the last time we tried to start meeting, still applies now.
We will be meeting in the stadium at 7:00 on Mon, Wed, Thu.
Running sessions will be followed by short strength / core sessions.
On Monday, Black group will do their tempo runs, Gold group will do their fartlek runs, White group will run a 6 minute test.
In order to educate you about the types of training efforts we'll do, I've made the following 2 videos. These videos explain a LOT about the type of efforts we need to be putting in, but they don't explain EVERYTHING. So, I will be continuing to try and give you the info that will help you understand what we are doing
Please watch these videos before the workout on Monday.
So, to summarize:
To do anything well, you need to spend as long as possible doing that thing
Run too slow, you don't get a tremendous training effect, run too fast, and you can't do it for very long.
Paces at the high end of zone 2 are in a sweet spot. They are fast enough to create a good training effect, but slow enough that you can do them for a fairly long time. The amount of time I'd aske you to run at each pace is as follows
75% - 30-70 minutes
80% - 15-40 minutes (could be broken into intervals of 5-15 minutes)
85% - 15-25 minutes (could be broken into intervals of 4-7 minutes)
90% - 12-24 minutes total, broken into intervals of 2-5 minutes
Paces faster than that, we don't do too much of.
These paces are based on what you have already acheived on a 6 minute test.
So, team. Let me offer my apologies. Apparently, I had miscommunicated with my bosses and in reality we did NOT have permission to start working out. ALL of the school districts in Stanislaus County had made the decision to re open (or keep closed) athletics as one group. So, even though the County Health Comissioner said it was ok to resume outdoor activities, the county schools say, "not yet".
I've laid out some guidelines for the month of June in this power point. Check 'em out.
I've gone through the power point in this video I posted to youtube
Let me just summarize quickly, because I can see that the audio quality is not that good on the video.
Black, Gold, White groups are based on how much you've been running these last 7 weeks and what your strengths are as a runner.
All groups need to SPRINT once per week. Something like 5 x 50 with full recovery. Obviously warm up first.
Black and Gold groups are doing one THRESHOLD type workout once a week. Black group does it as a 30 minute tempo run, Gold does it as Fartlek at CV pace, something like 4-6 x 3 minutes at 90% vVO2 with 1 minute jog recoveries
White group is focused just on building up their training mileage. How much? More than you are now. A good guideline for training volume for athletes to aim for looks like this
1st year runners - 15 - 30 miles per week
2nd year runners - 25-40 miles per week
3rd year runners - 25-50 miles per week
4th year runners - 35-60 miles per week.
These numbers can vary quite a bit. I was running 50mpw by the end of my freshman year but I've had athletes be very successful off of 30 mpw during their 3rd or 4th year.
All groups should be running strides. Black and Gold groups should do strides after their threshold sessions and then strides 1-2 additional times per week. White group should just be doing strides 3 times per week in addition to their easy running.
Since we can't get together and I can't actually COACH you for the next month, I'll be posting a number of different videos to try to teach you about the sport remotely.
I encourage you to video yourselves doing your workouts. Send them to me. I'll post them on this blog.
