At What Point This Fall Should You Start Race Pace Workouts?

One of the biggest mistakes I see coaches make is this:

They don’t have enough race pace work in their training from August to the final meet.

And while some coaches have adequate amounts of race pace work mid- to late-season, they don’t have enough of it in the training early in the season. Let's make sure this isn’t you.

Quickly...

The other big mistake I see is not doing strides from Day 1 of practice – here’s a progression of strides to remedy this

Let’s look at race pace work.

Race Pace Work

Let’s use some simple math today.

An 18:45 5k runner is running 6:00 per 1,600m, or 90 seconds per 400m.

1. This athlete needs to feel comfortable running lots of work at this pace in practice.
2. This athlete needs to have workouts where they:
   1. “Get out” for 100m-300m, replicating the start of the race
   2. Groove 18:45 pace (6:00 pace) for most of the workout
   3. Speed up at the end of the workout...
      1. This can be the last 100m of the last rep
      2. This can be the last 100m of the last two reps
      3. This can be the last 100-300m of the penultimate rep, then in the final rep they could switch gears twice and go “Fast, Faster”

The road from 18:30 to 18:15 to sub 18:00 starts with workouts where they learn to relax while maintaining 18:45 rhythm and then speed up.

“All Systems Go!” or “Some Systems Go?”

When you watch videos of space shuttles taking off, you hear someone saying, “All systems go.”

Yet so often with the athletes you coach, you have "some systems go."

• The aerobic system is ready to go after a summer of solid volume and challenging aerobic workouts.
• The musculoskeletal system is strong and resilient from daily commitment to post-run work.
• Some programs have kids ready to deal with lactate because of lots of hard hill workouts.

And in some famous coach’s systems, plenty of work is faster than goal pace.

But what’s often missing is race pace work.

Stop for a second and answer these two questions:

1. How long will the athlete spend running 6:00 pace in the race?
2. If the ball sports coach you most respect at your school were to observe your training, would they ask, “When do you practice the things that the kids do in competition?”

If your 18:45 runner isn’t running 6:00 minute pace for quite a while in the week, how can we expect them to run 18:45 pace for 4k or 4.5k and then speed up to PR?

Yes, 5k XC is an aerobic endeavor.

And yes, as Jeff Messer, PhD, Augustana University says, “We’re in the business of building mitochondria” via these workouts so kids can run faster.

But so many kids have big engines, yet when the gun goes off, the pace feels fast.

18:45 is slow compared to what this athlete can run for 800m and 400m.

If 18:45 doesn’t feel good in the first 1,600m and 2,000m into the race, that’s a problem.

For most kids, most weeks of the XC season, a successful race looks like

1. “Getting out” and be in a position early in the race where you want them to be.
2. Running race pace, staying as relaxed as they can while enduring discomfort.
3. Speeding up at the pre-determined point in the race to run a PR or run a great race on a challenging course.

One, two, three. That’s it.

Keep XC Simple

XC is hard. Often brutally hard.

And XC is not complex.

“Pummel them with pace.”- Timo Mostert, American Fork (UT) boys

Could you do a long run or a challenging aerobic workout at the end of the week, and include a race-pace workout early in the week?

Yes.

Could you infuse yoga into your weekly routine like Dan Iverson, Naperville North girls’ coach, does?

Absolutely.

But you don’t need to make XC complex.

To what extent have athletes put in the work up to today, take the next logical step in their progression of volume and intensity, making sure they’re doing race pace work before the first race?

Note: “Next logical step” is a term my college coach used that’s extremely useful. Take a moment and think about how often it can be rightly applied to points in the year in training and racing.

“Wait. We have a time trial/race in 2-3 weeks. Should we do race pace work this week?”

Maybe, maybe not. I can’t give you guidance without knowing what you’ve done up to this point.

What I can say is that getting in some race pace work is the right thing to do for an athlete who has put in a great summer and is ready to run a great race, or run “compared to last year at this time” PR.

Give them some work at race pace to make sure they’re All Systems Go.