Setting up the Border to your Season

Setting up the Border to your Season

by Tony Veney

excerpt from "Terminal Velocity" Manual

My wife is an avid "puzzler" and we all know the first rule of putting together a puzzle is to find the corners. I once gave my wife a puzzle that did not have any corners or straight edges (It darn near drove her to drink!). Because she could not narrow the shape and size of the puzzle, her efforts to manage and organize the pieces were disjointed and scattered. Unfortunately, as coaches we sometimes coach our sprinters the same way. In addition, try putting together a puzzle without a picture of the finished product. In the same way my wife dumps the box of puzzle pieces on the table and hunts for the pieces that make the boarder, and looking at the what the final product is supposed to look like she can make the puzzle come together. So as sprints coaches, let's put the pieces on the table and look at what you want your sprinter to look like at the end of the season.

         How many weeks are there in your season?
How many dual/scoring meets will you run?
How many invitationals will you run?
Will you run indoors and outdoors?
Is the sprinter coming from another sport?
How do I handle injuries?
When is their biggest meet?

To be successful training sprinters (or any event), coaching from the beginning of the season is replete with landmines. You cannot see the accumulative affect of the season's stress level and potential for injury. But if you count the coast starting from the Junior Olympics, State Meet, District or whenever their biggest competition as week one, you then count your weeks all the way back to the first week of the season as the last. For example, a typical high school track season can run 13-16 weeks (Alaska has only 12 weeks) depending on when your state federation calls the first day of official practice. For this example we will use 14 weeks. Count back from the state meet as week #1 and the first week of practice will represent week #14. The following example will show meets, and race volumes to give you an idea of how the season can get away from you if you're not careful.

At the beginning of the season are you really planning to race your sprinter 56 to 60 times? There are 98 days in a 14 week track season and 18 days have been used for Dual Meets, Invites, League, District, and State. That leaves 80 days to figure out what to do next. The next 14 days are going to be Sundays, which I hope can be used for complete rest and recovery.

You now have 66 days remaining in your 14 week season to decide how you will coach your sprinters to their best performances. The rules governing sprint training dictate that 2-3 anaerobic workouts per week are the most you should do (and this includes the meet). This means that during the 14 week cycle you have another 14-20 remaining hard days depending on how well they recover from the stressful days and competitions. That leaves around 52-46 days to figure out what to do next. If you factor in another 20 days for rest or light recovery days, you're left with 32-26 days to figure out what to do next. So now you have 14 weeks to divide the remaining days into technique, medium to easy days, tempo running, start days, hand offs (all of which can be made into challenging or hard days), play days or running games to freshen up the legs, and an occasional surprise "just go home" day.

So by looking at the entire year from a calendar you set up while plugging in the hard, easy, medium, rest, and competition days, you will see where you can run big and where you have to back off. Don't let injuries force you to rest when by plugging in appropriate rest you choose when to back off. But if you coach from March to June instead of the other way around, you'll never know the cost until you crash. When you use the approach outlined here, you decide when to hammer and when to back off because you will know exactly how the accumulative stress of the year will affect your sprinter. The key to any training program is getting the kid to the starting line with fresh legs for the competition. So no training program is worth its salt if you can perform "ON THE DAY."

Understand that rest is one of the good four letter words and you cannot hurt a kid when they are resting. Don't view rest as what to do when they get hurt, use rest as a training component to keep them from getting hurt. This approach gives you more control over your training philosophy and prevents you from just doing what you've always done. Knowing why you do what you do is just as important as what you do. You may want to run 500-400-300 on Monday, but once you consult your calendar, you'll see the weekend invitational has eight races planned and a rough workout like 500-400-300 may leave them too flat to punch out eight runs on Saturday. But without the plan to refer to, you just run hard without counting the cost. Good Hunting!

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