How Challenging Should Hard Days Be?

One of the chapters in Consistency Is Key that is both overlooked and misunderstood is this: Do Easy Days Easy and Hard Days Hard. Let’s talk about the second part of this maxim.

How Hard Should The Hard Days Be?

Let’s talk about what we don’t want to have happen.

We don’t want long runs and challenging aerobic workouts to turn into races.

While a college athlete or a professional athlete may be able to recover from a progression run that “got away from them” and turned into a race, a sophomore in high school is going to be wrecked 24 and 48 hours later if their 25-minute run was a race and not a workout.

This leads to the 11th point in the book, Know You Could Have Gone Farther or Faster (or Both).

• Kids need to end long runs being able to say both “I could have gone farther” and “I could have gone faster.”
• Kids need to end progression runs being able to say, “I could have gone a little farther at the last pace.”

But the flip side is so often both athletes and coaches see a workout I assign and wrongly think that because it’s a simple workout it must be an easy workout.

Don’t confuse simple with easy.

The five aerobic workouts I use in the winter and at the beginning of the outdoor season aren’t complex, but they are not easy...not if you run ‘em right.

If you don’t know what these workouts are, check out this in-depth article . Yes, the article title has “cross country” in it, but I use the same workouts to build the aerobic engine in the winter as I do in the summer, so it’s perfect for February and early March.

Here are two examples of simple workouts that are hard, if they're executed correctly.

A 30-minute fartlek of 3 minutes “on” followed by 2 min steady is enough to help a boy run well into the 9:30s and faster come April.

A 25-minute progression run of 10 min steady, 5 min a bit faster, 5 min a bit faster, 5 min fast but controlled is a killer workout for a girl who will run low 5’s in the 1600m. When they end saying, “I had 3-5 more minutes left, but that’s it” then they had a great workout.

When the athlete runs these correctly, they'll be glad to be done and will have to mentally get ready to knock out their post-run work, which comes immediately after the workout.

And remember that a simple assignment is nice as they don’t spend mental energy thinking about the workout – they just go out and run hard.

“What Does the Week Look Like?”

In February, most programs should schedule their long run for Saturday to take advantage of the sunlight, ensuring there’s enough time for the necessary post-run work.

Tuesday is ideal for a challenging aerobic workout. Feel free to tell the kids on Monday that Tuesday will be hard. It’s not a bad thing for kids to know they’ll be pushed out of their comfort zone and be anticipating that.

We’re heading to the track as early as Week 2 on Thursdays. However, this isn’t a traditional "speed" workout. The goal on Thursday is to prepare athletes to handle 1600m and 800m goal paces as soon as possible.

This is a mistake I made for too many years - not getting to the track early enough in the season.

While we started with strides on the first day of practice and had a progression moving us toward 800m rhythm faster than most programs, I was still waiting too long to get on the track for this specific work.

The bottom line is:

We want athletes running 120s, 150s, and even the occasional 300m as early as the second week of training to prepare them so that when they race an 800m in March, they’re ready to perform at their fitness level.

Will They Peak Too Soon?

If you’re thinking, “Jay, I’m worried athletes will peak too soon if we’re on the track by the second week of February,” don’t be.

You should be worried instead about the converse: having athletes with big aerobic engines who can’t change gears/speed up in the last 100m or 300m or 500m of a 1600m race because you didn’t start this work early enough.

Also, the best training systems don't have athletes "hold a peak" for a handful of weeks, and then fade. Rather, the athletes will continue to run faster week after week, with their fastest racing coming in the last 3-4 weeks of the year.

In sum...

• Make sure the hard days are being run hard.
• Make sure you’re going to the track by week 2.

Related Training Videos

21-Day Training Plan for High School Runners - It Keeps High School Runners Injury-Free

Mental Skills for Runners - 1600m and Mile - Racing to your fitness level