Five Things We Got Right Last Season

Just like we evaluate every race to identify points of success and opportunities for growth, I think it’s important to evaluate our season.  This is true for each individual runner, but also for me as a coach regarding our training.  I’ve had a lot of time over the past few months to not only reflect over how last season went, but also to learn a lot more as a coach through articles, books, podcasts, videos, and my trip to the Boulder Running Clinic in January.  Through those experiences, I can see that we did quite a few things right, at least in as much as they align well with some of the top programs in the nation.  At the same time, some of our practices were headed in the right direction but could have been better.  I’ve also learned some things that really weren’t a significant part of our program at all.  
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In this three-part series, I want to identify five concepts belonging to each area.  This post will start with the good, but stay tuned for the other two.

#1  A Dynamic Warmup

Let’s begin with the literal beginning of our practices.  Every cross country practice I attended in high school started with some combination of a warmup run and static stretching.  This was allegedly the tried and true recipe to reduce injuries.  In my time as an assistant coach, things were no different.  For years time this was all I knew and what I therefore assumed every program followed.  But the truth is that the practices of elite runners and successful programs had shifted in the last fifteen years based on emerging data.  Whether you look to major running publications, leading authorities on training, or top shoe companies, the verdict is the same:  static stretching before running is at best ineffective and at worst dangerous with regard to injury prevention.  While static stretching might be beneficial as part of post-run work, dynamic stretching much more adequately prepares an athlete’s range of motion, neuromuscular pathways, and cardiovascular system for running.  It is these areas that need to be primed before running to lower injury risk.

The dynamic warmup we used last season was developed by Jeff Boele.  Jeff is an experienced high school coach and licensed massage therapist who currently works as a consultant for both Niwot and Mountain Vista High Schools in Colorado.  These are top-tier programs in the country.  For reference, last year the girls teams for these two schools finished second and third at Nike Nationals respectively (the Niwot boys also finished fifth).  These are programs that know how to be successful, and so I do believe it was the right choice to follow in their footsteps on this one, even if that means backward skips.

Coach Jeff Boele developed the dynamic warmup we use. He also created our barefoot routines.

#2 Daily Strength and Mobility Training

I want to stick with the theme of injury prevention because it was a major priority last season.  That was partly due to the limited size of the team and the desire to make sure we had enough runners to score come districts.  But more importantly, I have never met an optimally happy injured runner.  Being hurt sucks.  Missing races is awful.  I know this firsthand, and so I wanted to minimize as much as possible the likelihood of our runners going through the same.

Some health issues and injuries have little to do with training.  They could simply develop outside of the sport.  Other injuries result from a traumatic event, but those are generally rare in a non-contact sport like cross country.  Most running injuries fall within the category of repetitive stress.  The same muscles are used in the same ways over and over.  This builds fatigue and strain.  Running form breaks down, which ultimately loads additional strain on other parts of the body forced to carry the load until something gives out. 

​In fact, quite often the parts of the body that ultimately suffer injury are actually not the weakest ones.  The most common sources of weakness for runners are their glutes and hips, and yet the most frequent running injuries involve the knees, calves, ankles, shins, and feet.  Why?  Weak hips and glutes can’t do their job well as repeated running increases in volume, and so the load falls further down the leg until a problem spot develops.

So how do we reduce these issues?  One way is to change up the sorts of stresses runners experience.  We’ll look at a few methods for this in later posts, but at the end of the day, running is still running.  Some stresses will always be repetitive, and so giving a runner’s body additional strength and range of motion is the easiest way to lower the risk of strain to muscles and connective tissue.  And while running itself can accomplish this to a point, the addition of ancillary strength and mobility work is a more direct route.

That is why last year we introduced daily post-run routines.  At first glance it might look like an alphabet soup of silly hopping and motions.  In reality, we are targeting the core, posterior chain (glutes, hamstrings, calves), and connective tissues.  Since this was something mostly new to our runners, it had to be phased in gradually to avoid overuse.  However, I do think this played a huge role in the relative lack of injuries.  The hill sprints we incorporated toward the end of the season also serve a similar purpose while reducing the strain on the legs compared to running on level ground.  

While no two teams follow the same routine, every top-tier program I encountered in Boulder makes strength and mobility training a regular part of their training and speaks to it as integral to their success.  I think it should continue to be a key player in ours as well.  

Coach Jay Johnson is a former assistant at the University of Colorado. He is the coordinator of the Boulder Running Clinics. He's also the man behind our CoreX and Lower Body Circuit workouts.

#3 Limiting the Number of Races

Keeping runners healthy allows them to compete.  I loved to race as a student.  It was the opportunity to show off all of the hard work we’d put in during the season.  That’s still true as a coach, where I get to see each of our runners succeed.  But when it comes to racing, I’ve learned that more isn’t always merrier.  

Races take a huge toll on the body, even more so than our most grueling workouts.  They demand a lot of recovery time.  Packing a schedule with too many races doesn’t allow for that.  It leads to runners racing at less than full capacity, which ultimately leads to poor performances and greater injury risk.  
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That is why I made the difficult decision for us to run two fewer races last season.  I knew that meant two fewer opportunities for runners to reach their goals and for parents and other fans to see everyone in action.  But in hindsight I don’t regret the choice.  With only seven races, by and large we were at our strongest at the end of the season.  Meanwhile competitors like the Puxico boys and Oak Ridge girls–who each ran 10 races–were struggling just to finish the season in one piece. 

But as a math person, I’m always one to want more than a few anecdotes.  And so I looked at last year’s Class 5 Boys State Race.  In Class 1 and 2, teams can get away with sub-par practices and still be successful.  That isn’t true at all in Class 5, where teams need to be doing most things right to be successful.  Out of curiosity, I looked at the race schedules of the all-state finishers.  Not a single one of the top 30 boys ran more than 7 regular season races.  I also looked at the amount of recovery time they allowed between races.  All but two runners ran every one of their races with at least a week of recovery.  You can see those results here.

All of this deepened my conviction that we made the right choice last year.  My intention is to be just as if not more cognizant about race load and layoffs this time around.

The top 15 boy runners at the 2023 Class 5 State Meet along with the number of races they ran before districts and their shortest layoff.

#4 Starting Slower, Ending Faster

Watch most high school (and a decent percentage of college) cross country races, and you see the same story.  Nearly everyone starts like a bat out of hell.  By the half-mile mark, they are already beginning to slow down significantly.  The one-mile times still look decent because of the front-loading, but the second mile is a trainwreck as runners succumb to overexertion, with even top finishers running up to a minute slower than the first.  Sometimes the third mile improves slightly on the second mile, but it rarely comes close to matching that first mile.  Runners might show up at the finish stretch with a flashy sprint for all eyes watching, but the part before that were still pretty ugly.

The crazy thing is that this strategy regularly leads high school runners to victory.   That might seemingly suggest that this is the optimal approach, but a little reflection shows that a race strategy can’t be fairly evaluated when everyone is following it.  If all runners go out fast, die in the second mile, and return to a very unimpressive form of life in the last mile, then the best runner will simply be the most fit one who dies the least and rebounds the fastest.  That has nothing to do with strategy.  By analogy, imagine a class of students where no one studies for tests.  The brightest student gets the highest score, but it would be foolish for that student to therefore conclude that not studying is the best approach.  That sort of conclusion would only be fair after equally intelligent students who do study take the test and receive lower scores.  The same is true of race strategy.  

When you look at top performances in the distance running events, nearly every world record has been set by individuals running negative splits–meaning the later portions of their race were faster than the earliest.  Put simply, elite runners hit their optimal times by running negative splits.  In other words, starting a race conservatively fast and then speeding up toward the end is–in a vacuum at least–the ideal race plan.
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That being said, cross country races aren’t run in a vacuum … or even on a track.  Some courses have more hills or sharp turns in the later miles.  The course may be narrow with many runners, creating the need to go out a bit faster to secure good positioning.  The psychological profile of some runners might not lend itself as easily to starting further back in the pack and moving up.  There is also the risk of being too conservative in the opening portions and leaving too much in the proverbial tank.  Ample room remains to play around with the exact pacing strategy, especially as a runner develops.  But as a general rule, negative splits are what the top runners shoot for.  As difficult as it was for our returning runners to ease off the first mile and dial up the later ones, I think it is the path to our fastest races in the long run.

The fastest 5k in history was run with the last two kilometers being the fastest.

Parker actually broke her own record while I was writing this post, so I had to update her splits. Notice again how the two fastest kilometers are the last ones.

​#5 Race-Pace Workouts

Mastering a strategy like negative-split racing takes practice.  In one sense regular season races provide these opportunities.  Nothing came closer to our district race at Notre Dame then the race there a month earlier, even with the sharp contrast in temperature.  But the problem is that races are what I call coachably static.  What I mean by that is once a race starts, a coach actually has very little control over a runner’s execution and performance.  This is all the more true in cross country, where unlike other sports there are no halftimes or timeouts.  If a runner goes out too fast in a race, I can’t ask the official to pause the race so I can remind the runner to ease up.  That means each race only provides one opportunity to practice any aspect of a race.  With only seven regular season races, that isn’t a lot of practice.

That’s why race-pace workouts are so valuable.  We run at our goal race pace, but at shorter distances (400-1600m) with breaks in between.  Those breaks are like timeouts, too short for full recovery but long enough to allow runners to reset and for coaches to offer any necessary feedback or adjustments.  Maybe the workout is 5 x 1000m.  We can practice the first repetition like it is the start of the race.  If that goes well, the second repetition can practice holding a solid pace during the middle of the race.  But if a runner blows up the first rep and goes way too fast, maybe the second one is an additional opportunity to nail the starting pace.  These workouts provide the sort of flexibility a race doesn’t, making them much more coachably dynamic. 

Race-pace workouts also allow runners to build what is called specific endurance, the ability to run their goal pace for the required distance of their race (5000 meters in our case).  Maybe a runner wants to break (run faster than) 20 minutes in the 5k.  They have the endurance to run 3 miles.  They can also run a mile in 6:26.  They just can’t do both together.  They can get there by stretching one side or the other.  They could continue to run 5k and slowly lower the pace from their current point to the goal.  Or they could run shorter intervals at a 6:26 pace and then gradually lengthen the distances.  A runner can sort of take the first approach through actual races, but since the length of a race is fixed, the second path isn’t an option.  In race-pace workouts, either approach can be taken fully. 

The one challenge is that since these workouts ask runners to perform at race paces, they require a runner to be similarly rested as they would for a race.  They also generate comparable levels of fatigue, meaning a runner will need close to the same amount of time to recover after these workouts as they would following a race.  Practically, that demands that race-workouts and races have ample separation.  In a schedule maxed out with races, there simply isn’t space to responsibly fit in many race-pace workouts.  This offers another motivation for limiting the number of races so more race-pace workouts can occur.
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While the exact combination of interval quantity and duration varies, the top programs unanimously move to these sort of workouts in the sharpening period before their biggest races.  We saw some phenomenal pacing execution by our runners at state last season, and I think that stemmed largely from the practice allowed by the race-pace workouts we performed in the weeks leading up to the meet.

Coach Brad Hudson is best known for coaching former American 5k record holder Dathan Ritzenhein. His coaching has influenced my thought on specific endurance. He's also the inspiration for our hill sprints.

These five things are hardly the only ones we did well last season.  I could certainly list others, but I could also name some areas that could use improvement.  Stay tuned for the next post to see a few of those addressed!