Cross Country-Late Season

Your IATC hopes you find the following suggestions and helpful ideas benefitial to your Cross Country program. We have asked a number of outstanding coaches to share their thoughts of how and what they are and/or have been doing to produce the great teams and individuals during their coaching career. Each coach has seen his/her teams produce numerous conference, district and state high finishes and titles over the years.

Jim Boughton – Dubuque Senior (Past Away 2010)
Typical Late-Season Week – (late-Sept/early Oct)
Monday: good warm-up, long repeats faster than race pace (3 x 600 for rookies, 4 x 1000 for veterans), 3 x 150 speed work (full recovery), 10 to 15 minutes jogging on grass

  • Tuesday:easy distance run for recovery, form strides
  • Wednesday: Go through simulated meet warm-up, 2 mile easy run
  • Thursday: MEET
  • Friday: Long run with strides, 5 to 8 miles, 3 x 200 race pace or a little faster, 1 mile easy

Scott Conway – South Winneshiek
Late season and mid season are very similar.
The only difference is that I expect the intervals to be faster because our race pace is faster.
I want to see less recovery time between each interval.

Kevin Kearney – South Winneshiek
These are workouts that my boy’s teams have done over the past two or three seasons.
Our girls do virtually the same thing, although pace and total mileage are adjusted to some degree.

Week Eight:

  • Monday: 1½ miles easy, 6 x 100 meter accelerations, 1½ miles easy
  • Tuesday: Meet
  • Wednesday: Long easy run. 6 to 11 miles
  • Thursday: Meet
  • Friday: On your own easy run
  • Saturday: 16 x 400 on track. 4 sets of 4 x 400’s. 100 meter jog between each 400.
    400 meter jog between each set.
    1st set of 4 @ 85-90 – 2nd set of 4 @80-85
    3rd set of 4 @ 75-80 – last set of 4 @ 70-75
  • Sunday: OFF

Timm Lamb – Ft. Madison (Retired)
We will stay with interval runs but they will become shorter and faster – 400 – 300 – 200.
We will run a long run once a week for endurance.
Friday’s are still hill workout days but they involve more speed up and down the hills.
Shorter hill are used.
Weekends are used to keep the base up, 4 to 5 miles runs.

Randy Fahr – Eldora New Providence (Retired)
The final 3 weeks include 4 more meets, the last of which is the conference meet.
We continue to have one long run weekly, but the distance is less. Our weekly mileage starts to slowly reduce towards the end of week 8. We continue to do strides, and continue to blend reps with intervals. Our reps now are 600’s or ladders and our intervals are 200’s, 300’s, and
400’s, some with short recovery in week 7 and 8. We really emphasize everything we do in this phase, to be smooth and not forced. We constantly tell them to run strong. A workout can be very hard without being strained. We want our runners to experience tough conditions, but we do not want them so over stressed from practice that they cannot reach their goals in meets.

Glenn Daniels – Olathe, Kansas (Previously Indianola)
Late season workout week has lower mileage, but more uptempo work.
This week runs from the day after our conference meet, on Tues., to
our district meet the following Thurs.

  • Wednesday:5 mile run – recovery pace
  • Thursday: 5 mile run at Lake Ahquabi – alternating terrain, alternating pace
  • Friday: 2 mile Warm up to track
    8 x 200m hard – 200m jog interval
    1 1/2 mile Warm down to HS
  • Saturday: REST
  • Sunday: 30 min easy run on your own
  • Monday: 2 mile Warm up to campus
    4 x 600 hard around central campus – ample rest
    1 1/2 mile Warm down to HS
  • Tuesday: 5 mile run – alternating pace
  • Wednesday: 3 mile run with at least 3 accelerations thrown in
  • Thursday: Districts

 

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