srileyathens 0 Report post Posted March 24, 2003 I am coaching high school track for distance events (800-3200). I have some good ideas for workouts that I am going to use (I think). I am always looking for new and creative ideas and would be interested in sharing ideas. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
directorjaguarstexas 0 Report post Posted March 24, 2003 I coach 9-14 year old middle distance athletes and I'm also looking for new ideas. Please share...... My athletes do a 15 min run on hills to give them stronger(powerful) legs and to help them learn to fight off the latic acid build up. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Noah0295 0 Report post Posted March 25, 2003 Both of you sound pretty knowledgable. How many miles a week should my athletes be training? Do your distance runners do any sprint work in addition to their longer runs?Thanks! Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
directorjaguarstexas 0 Report post Posted March 26, 2003 How old are your athletes? My athletes run at least 8 miles per week, plus their workout. And they should do sprint work as well to increase their turn over coming into the home stretch. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Noah0295 0 Report post Posted March 26, 2003 We are talking about middle school athletes. What kind of drills do you do to keep it fun and interesting. Also, how do you evaluate your distance runners? Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
directorjaguarstexas 0 Report post Posted April 28, 2003 Middle school athletes are at that cross road of "well I run since my friends are doing it..but I really don't care".. so you're correct in saying you should keep it fun. The type of dirlls I would do with this age: high knee drills, kick butts, the majorette drill, sprint drills, (if you need more detail let me know and I'll provide that for you) Lot's of streching. Evaluating distance runners: Time trials are the only way to ensure that your distance runners are improving. My runners take weekly 20 min runs which are timed. No target times, but I keep a record of what they ran the week prior, and after each meet on Saturday I expect times to drop. Usually this is done every Wed. hump day practice. I also evaluate them based on their performance at the last meet. I demand that my athletes consistantly improve on their times. This can be done. Making it fun will be hard. I can only suggest endless mile relay exchanges (kids love that baton!) as well as duck duck goose games (on the track of course) each athlete depending on if he's a sprinter, quater milers, half or miler. Have them run a quater each time they're pickd. Your distance runners should run at least an 800. I found this to be fun for the kids. Let me know if there's anything else I can do for you. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
srileyathens 0 Report post Posted May 28, 2003 Now that the season is over I have found several things that seemed to work well. The high school kids always did 800m as a warm up. I tried to mix speed days with road runs. These road runs lessoned as the season went on. Track work might include things such as 8 x 200m at race pace, 6 x 400m at race pace. !35m pick ups help with kicks. They start running and slowly build pace until they are at full speed with 35m left. Another drill we did was called two minute drills. The kids run for 2 minutes and the stop at that spot and wait for two minutes to build up acids. We normally did this 8-10 times. Someone asked about fun things for junior high. We had enough kids to run mini meets with ourselves as well as meets with other schools for our Junior High program. They enjoy competing and this works well for hard workouts. I had them do many of the same workouts our High School kids did but with less reps.Hope this helps,Scott Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites