Five Things With Room For Improvement

There were a number of things we did right last season.  In last week’s post, I outlined five of them.  However, success wasn’t true of everything.  As a program we should always be on the lookout for ways to improve.  In a number of areas, we were on the right track but could have done better.  This week I want to discuss five of them.

#1 Alternating Surfaces

When I was in high school, we had the luxury of a permanent course right in front of school.  That meant 95% of our workouts were run on grass and the other 5% on the track.  This was beneficial in many ways.  First, running on hard pavement is a much different experience than the turf of a cross country course.  The unstable terrain that tufts of grass offer require much more engagement from the muscles in the foot and lower leg.  It also slows a runner down.  Yet at the same time it deadens some of the shock force on the legs produced by streets and sidewalks.  Over time these shock forces can contribute toward conditions like shin splints, stress fractures, and runner’s knee.

By the end of last season, we were definitely running more days on grass than pavement, but training didn’t start that way.  Nearly all of our summer work was on the streets around school.  While we were fortunate to see very few shin splints throughout the summer, the transition to grass in August did seem to cause some calf and ankle troubles for a number of runners.
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In hindsight, I should have incorporated other surfaces sooner.  This summer I plan to have the team on the back loop of the course for most of our Tuesday aerobic workouts.  Each Thursday we will also be doing an easy trail run.  Trails like the one at the county lake offer even more uneven terrain than the average cross country course.  This works feet and leg muscles in ways that even grass wouldn’t.  Getting exposure to this during the summer will further break the repetition of road running while giving opportunities for feet, ankles, and calves to be strengthened.

I first learned the importance of trail running from Coach Sean O'Connor at Lafayette, whose 2015 boys team posted the lowest team score in state meet history for Class 4 (now Class 5).

#2 Easy Days Easy

We certainly had easy days last year.  That was a bit complicated at times during the summer with the variety of workouts going on.  But by the start of official practice, there were generally recovery days following races and race-pace workouts.  However, what I’ve learned in recent months is that my definition of easy wasn’t strong enough.
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The top coaches I’ve had the chance to speak with, hear talks and interviews from, or read publications about almost unanimously mention doing easy days 2-3 minutes slower than race pace.  To use an example, I want to turn to the online pace calculator developed by Coach Thomas “Tinman” Schwartz.  

Based on Schwartz’s calculator, someone running a 5k at 5-minute-mile pace (essentially a 15:30 time) should run their easy days at 7-8 minutes per mile.  Even their long run days should hover near six minutes per mile.  To be honest, seeing these times shocked me, especially when I considered what they meant for my much slower race pace.

I’m a competitor at heart and a hard worker.  I outran people with much more talent in high school because I was willing to go all out every moment of every day.  But if I’m honest, it’s probably also why I spent the majority of my senior season in a walking boot recovering from a stress fracture in my foot.  It’s really hard for me as a runner to make easy days easy, and sometimes that mentality seeps into my coaching.

The truth is that our bodies simply aren’t made to go hard every day.  They need opportunities to recover.  That doesn’t necessarily mean not running, but it does mean running at a pace that doesn’t create a larger deficit.  When easy days are run too hard, a runner won’t fully recover in time for their next hard workout.  Ultimately that means the hard workout isn’t run at the planned intensity, and therefore the intended benefits are placed in jeopardy.  Instead of a mixture of hard days that expand aerobic capacity and muscle fiber recruitment with easy recovery days, a runner essentially ends up with a steady dose of moderate days.  And as we’ve said previously, doing the same thing day after day is an easy recipe for injury.

Thomas "Tinman" Schwartz helped coach Drew Hunter, one of the top high school runners in the last decade and one of only six high school runners to go sub-4 in the mile on two separate occasions.

#3 Mental Skills

Prior to the last decade, the mental aspect of the sport was never openly discussed.  At best we did a very small amount of race strategizing in high school.  But there were no team meetings, no analyses of race performances, no visualization work.  In my early stint as an assistant coach, we did varying degrees of goal-setting and the occasional team meeting.  This was the foundation I started last season with.
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Running a cross country race is incredibly demanding physically.  It requires a significant blend of aerobic capacity, neuromuscular fitness, and specific endurance.  But what is so often discounted are the mental requirements of the sport.  Each race is in so many ways a psychological battleground.  One can easily lose focus and check out during a race.  Anxiety can ruin a race before it even begins.  Without comfort being uncomfortable, the first signs of difficult breathing or soreness will have a runner backing off.

We did work on some of this during the season, especially leading up to state.  We tried to mentally walk through each course, and to even visualize the race unfolding there.  Our race-pace workouts built focus and experience with discomfort.  But what I’ve learned over the offseason is that the mental side of the sport runs so much deeper than this.  It’s about cultivating a healthy relationship with the race, one that sees each race as a gift and a blessing, something you get to do rather than have to do.  

So much of running mirrors the rest of our lives.  We’re learning to balance our need for belonging and our fear of the unknown.  Struggles with comparison, preoccupation with the thoughts of others, unrealistic expectations, and perfectionism don’t magically disappear when a runner steps out of the classroom and onto the course.  In fact, for some they intensify.  

This isn’t just new for me or our team.  It's one of the frontiers on the cutting edge of the sport, an aspect demanding growth from both athletes and coaches.  That means we all have a lot to learn.  The mental skills of running were the primary focus of the Boulder Running Clinics this year.  I learned a lot from the presentations of coaches like John O’Malley and sports psychologists like Shannon Thompson.  I hope to continue growing in that knowledge and implementing it in the season to come.

Shannon Thompson works as a sports performance psychologist, most notably with the Northern Arizona University Cross Country Program. John O'Malley heads the cross country program at Sandburg High School outside Chicago and is the only person to coach two Footlocker national champions. These two have influenced my understanding of mental skills more than any others, so it was really neat to watch them have a conversation with each other while in Boulder.

#4 Nutrition

The nutritional guidance I received as a high school runner could be exhausted by two rules:  don’t drink soda, and eat a ton of pasta the night before a race.  The first is fairly good advice, while the second is a bit flawed, Yet neither scratches the surface of how to properly fuel and care for a runner’s body.  

Inside the cells of a runner, a lot of chemistry has to take place for optimal performance.  The fundamental question is what our bodies need at what times and in what quantities in order to create the best outcomes.  Among the general population, more advice on diet and nutrition exists than any person could ever swim through.  Even in the world of runners or competitive athletes in general, one can find all sorts of ideas, many of which openly contradict each other.  This leads many individuals to abandon the endeavor of healthy nutrition altogether.  However, much agreement does exist in the realm of running nutrition, and where there is disagreement, studies and data often point the way toward the truth.

Last summer I posted a document with some guidance on the quantities of macronutrients (carbohydrates, proteins, and fats) to consume.  I also tried to supply our team with nutritious (and tasty) treats following our harder workouts.  We also introduced healthier snacks at meets.  All of these things were good steps, but there are many more to go.  

In recent months I’ve been wrestling with whether specific nutrient prescriptions are best for high school runners.  I see the benefits in an alternative approach referred to as intuitive eating.  I often wonder if simpler isn’t better here. 

​Many coaches I trust stress the importance of iron levels in performance and the tendency for runners to end up iron deficient, and so this is something I need to study more.  I’d like our runners to better understand how nutritional needs are different before and after a race/workout and how this determines the ideal meals and snacks on both ends.  I would also love to have more high-quality pre-run snacks available to our runners for both races and practices.  Connecting parents with resources that help them better understand the nutritional needs of runners and answer any questions is an additional big priority going forward. 
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Outside of sleep, nutrition is probably the easiest way a high school runner can improve performance.  I hope with a little more learning from all of us, we can make some huge strides in that direction.

Jeff Messer led the Desert Vista girls team to a fifth place finish at Nike Nationals in 2014 and 6th place in 2016. Just as impressive, he holds a PhD in exercise physiology. He is the ultimate nerd on all things training, including nutrition, where he's taught me a lot.

#5 Hills

Nutrition is hardly the only aspect of training with mixed opinions.  Hill training is a divisive issue, not just within our team at times last season, but across the sport.  That’s a fairly clear indicator that there’s room for improvement for the running community and our team specifically.

My own running background included very little hill work.  Generally hills were reserved to the two or three Saturdays where we didn’t have races near the beginning of the season .  We would alternate doing sets of repetitions between a shorter, steeper hill and a longer, gradual hill.  Since they took place on Saturday, they didn’t disrupt the rhythm of our weekly workouts.  The rest of our season not only lacked any hill workouts, but it lacked any runs over hilly terrain.  Our permanent course was flat as a pancake, with one small slab-of-butter hill.  Yet year in and year out we produced powerhouse teams that brought back trophies from the state meet, which at that time was still at the monstrously hilly Oak Hills Golf Center in Jefferson City.

I know other teams across the country who do exceedingly well (even at races with big hills) without any significant hill workouts.  The boys at Belen Jesuit Prep in Miami finished fourth at Nike Nationals last season.  You probably don’t need a topographical map to realize there are zero hills in that part of Florida. The same could largely be said of several powerhouse programs in the Chicago area.

At the same time, there are successful high school and college programs who do regular hill work.  The vast majority concentrate this work during summer training and the earliest parts of the season, but that really depends on the nature of the workouts.  Hill workouts–like the hills themselves–come in all shapes and sizes.  These range from short max-effort hill sprints to intermediate intervals run at 5k effort to longer runs done at an easier pace but entirely uphill (either on some sort of mountain road or using a treadmill).  Each type of hill workout has the potential to provide different benefits.  That could be aerobic endurance, but it could be strength or speed.  Perhaps it is primarily psychological. 

​Coach Jay Johnson, who I mentioned in last week’s post is the coordinator of the Boulder Running Clinics, generally discourages hill workouts.  His concern is that while running uphill is more aerobically challenging, it’s very difficult to predict its metabolic impact, especially across the varying grades of hills.  This means that with hill workouts–especially those with longer reps intended to build endurance or the body's ability to clear lactate–a runner can easily fall short of or (more frequently) overshoot the intended effort level for the desired training stimulus.  At best this puts the workout at risk of ineffectiveness.  Far worse would be the possibility of overtraining and thus injury.  The additional problem with these sorts of workouts is that because of their taxing nature and the need for runners to recover, these workouts end up taking the place of other challenging aerobic or race-pace workouts, which costs a runner the benefits of their training stimuli.

In the end, what I’ve learned is that there is no one, right, magical way to train.  Look at the top programs in the nation, and none of them train identically.  In fact, many of these programs don’t even train all of their runners the same way.  Nearly every benefit of a hill workout can be attained without hills.  Top programs don’t just do hills for the sake of hills.  The coaches of these programs understand the training stimuli they desire and craft workouts that targets them.  For some programs that includes hill workouts, whereas for others it doesn’t.  

In the end, I think I could have done a better job differentiating the types of hill workouts and their respective benefits.  Doing our race-pace workouts at the course or Blechle park was a good call, as both have changes in elevation that mimic typical race terrain.

​But specific hill workouts have to be run based on effort much more than on pace.  High school runners do best at matching effort levels on the ends of the spectrum.  The hill sprints we introduced late last season improve strength and running form, both of which increase speed and reduce injury risk.  They are maximum effort, and so there’s little risk of doing them wrong as long as their quantity is introduced gradually.  They were a great addition to our training, though in hindsight I wish we would have done these from the start of summer.  

Easier runs over steady or rolling hills build mental and aerobic stamina.  They require a comfortable pace that most runners can learn and adhere to.  While at times I did mandate routes with hills on some of these days, I think the team would have benefited from more consistency here. 

As for shorter repeat hill intervals, these are the ones most likely to be overdone.  It’s much harder for the average high school runner to dial in 5k or 1600m effort on a hill.  They tend to instead default to pace, and running uphill at 5k pace is not 5k effort.  That effort is going to be much easier to regulate on more even terrain, and so the benefits of running at that effort level are safer off the hills. 

Jason Fitzgerald hosts the highly informative Strength Running Podcast. He's also helped me understand the varying types and purposes of hill workouts.

These are just a handful of the areas where I hope we can improve on the progress we've already made.  A few others came to mind but didn't make the cut.  Still, there are some areas where we simply need to get off the ground.  Check back in next week as we take a closer look at some of them!