The Speed Reserve Nobody Talks About

Full Transcript

The Speed Reserve Nobody Talks About

Cold Open

Last meet of the outdoor season. We’re short a body for the 4×400.

Now, if you’ve coached track you know exactly what happens next. Somebody looks down the roster, sees the distance kid standing there in his warmups drinking a Gatorade, and says the fatal sentence. “He’s in shape. Put him in the relay.”

So we put Danny in the relay.

Danny was a 4:38 miler. Best aerobic engine on my team that year. Never missed a day, never complained, ran ninety minutes on a Sunday for fun.

He got the baton in second place and handed it off in fifth.

Sixty-four seconds. Meanwhile a sophomore sprinter who has never voluntarily run more than 600 meters in his life split 52 and made it look like he was jogging to his car.

I remember standing there thinking, that doesn’t make sense. Danny is fitter than that kid. Danny is fitter than everybody in that race.

And that’s the thing. He was fitter. He was also, in the most literal mechanical sense, slower than a kid who couldn’t finish a two-mile without stopping to think about his choices.

That relay is the whole episode. Because the reason Danny ran 64 is the same reason Danny ran 4:38 instead of 4:28.

Intro

Welcome back to Salty Talks. I’m Coach Saltmarsh. Twenty-five years on the track, thirty-one state champions, and today the most contrarian thing I’ll say all season.

Your 5K runners are slow because they can’t sprint.

I know. We’re a distance podcast. Two episodes ago I stood on this microphone and told you to run eighty percent of your training easy, and I meant every word of it. This is not a reversal. This is the other half of the sentence.

Because here’s what most of us do. We spend four years training the engine and we never once check the chassis. Then we’re confused when the car handles like a shopping cart with a bad wheel.

Today: what speed reserve actually is, the math that shows you why it caps your athletes, the three rules that make sprint work actually work, the three drills I’d run with any team in the country, how to fit it into a week without stealing from your aerobic development, and the mistakes that make coaches think this doesn’t work when what actually happened is they did it wrong.

Let’s go.

Segment One · The Math That Changed My Mind

Let me define the term first, because it sounds like jargon and it isn’t.

Speed reserve is the gap between how fast an athlete can possibly run and how fast they’re actually running in a race. That’s it. That’s the whole concept.

Now let me show you why the gap matters, because this is the part that reorganized my brain.

Take two kids. Both trying to break five minutes in the mile. Both need to run 75-second laps. Same goal, same race, same pace. Athlete A can run a 400 in 55 seconds flat out. Athlete B can run a 400 in 68.

So what is 75-second pace to each of them?

Metric	Athlete A	Athlete B
Max 400m	55 seconds	68 seconds
Race pace (5:00 mile)	75s / lap	75s / lap
Percent of max capacity	73%	90%

For Athlete A, 75-second pace is about 73 percent of his maximum. He’s cruising. He’s got room. For Athlete B, it’s 90 percent. He is redlining from the gun. He is running a five-minute mile at nearly all-out effort for four straight laps.

Same pace. Two completely different experiences.

And when the race gets hard at 1200 meters and somebody makes a move, guess which one has another gear. Athlete B doesn’t have a gear. Athlete B is already in his top gear and has been since the start line. All he can do is watch.

Here’s what I want you to notice. Nothing in that comparison is about fitness. Both kids are fit enough to run five minutes. The difference is that one of them is doing it at 73 percent and the other is doing it at 90.

Raising the ceiling makes everything underneath it easier. That’s the whole argument.

And there’s research underneath it too. Paavolainen and colleagues, 1999, took well-trained distance runners and added explosive strength work to their training. Their 5K times improved significantly. Their VO2 max did not change. Not a bit.

Sit with that. Faster 5K, identical engine. What improved was running economy. They got better at using what they already had.

Which means every year you spend building the engine while ignoring the chassis, you’re leaving free time on the table. Not hypothetical time. Free time. Time you already paid for in July.

Segment Two · Why We All Stopped Sprinting

So why doesn’t anybody do this? I’ll speak for myself. Three reasons.

First, I confused speed with speed endurance. When somebody said “speed work,” I heard 400 repeats. That’s not speed. That’s a metabolic workout wearing a costume. Real max velocity work lasts about six seconds and leaves your athletes fresher than when they started.

Second, I thought sprinting was for sprinters. There’s a wall in most track programs. Distance goes that way, sprinters go this way, and the two groups make fun of each other for four years. Everybody loses that arrangement.

Third, and this is the honest one, sprinting looks like it isn’t work.

If a parent walks by practice and sees my kids running six-second sprints and then standing around for three minutes, that looks like nothing is happening. If they see the same kids grinding out 12 by 400 until somebody throws up in the long jump pit, that looks like coaching.

One of those two sessions actually raises the performance ceiling. It is not the one with the vomiting.

I’ve had to make peace with that. Some of the most valuable fifteen minutes in my program look, to an outside observer, like a bunch of teenagers loitering.

Segment Three · The Three Rules

If you take the drills without the rules, this will not work and you’ll blame the drills. So here are the rules first. I’m adapting these from Tony Holler’s Feed the Cats philosophy, which came out of the sprint world and which I think is the most useful thing a distance coach can steal this decade.

Rule one. One hundred percent, or don’t bother.

You cannot sort of sprint. There’s no such thing. If a kid runs at 90 percent, he is doing an aerobic workout with extra steps. Maximum velocity is a specific neurological event and it only happens at maximum.

This is the rule athletes break constantly, because distance runners have spent their whole careers pacing themselves. Ask a cross country kid to sprint all-out and what you’ll get the first time is a hard, controlled, extremely well-managed 88 percent. It’s practically a personality trait. You will have to coach it out of them.

Rule two. Full recovery. More than feels reasonable.

The working number is one minute of rest for every ten meters sprinted. So a 30-meter fly gets three minutes. Three full minutes. For six seconds of work.

Your kids will think you’ve lost your mind. One of mine timed me once, out loud, counting down like a NASA launch, purely to make a point about how long we were standing there.

But this is neuromuscular training. You’re training the nervous system to fire faster, and a tired nervous system cannot demonstrate speed, which means it cannot learn speed. Rest is not the break between the reps. Rest is part of the rep.

Rule three. Quality over quantity, and end it early.

A speed session might be three sprints. Total. Thirty meters each. Ninety meters of hard running in a session that takes twenty minutes.

And here’s the discipline part. When the times start dropping off, the session is over. Not “two more.” Not “finish the set.” Over. Because once they slow down, every additional rep is teaching their nervous system how to run slower while tired, which is the exact opposite of the point.

I keep a stopwatch on it for that reason. Not to motivate them. To tell me when to stop.

Segment Four · The Three Drills

Three things. You can run all of them on a football field with equipment you probably already own.

One. Wickets. These are six-inch mini hurdles set five or six feet apart, and the athlete runs through them. That’s it.

I’ll tell you right now that the first time you set these out, it looks absurd. It looks like you’re building a steeplechase course for hamsters. My assistant asked if we were hosting a rabbit agility competition.

But what the wickets do is make bad mechanics physically impossible. The spacing forces an upright posture and front-side mechanics. A kid who over-strides and reaches out in front of his body will catch a hurdle immediately and get instant feedback that no amount of me yelling “shorten your stride” has ever produced in twenty-five years.

The cue I use is: step over the pipe, don’t kick the bucket. Three or four passes. That’s the drill.

Two. Flying 30s. This is the centerpiece. Twenty meters of build-up, thirty meters at absolute maximum, twenty meters to slow down.

The build-up matters. You’re not sprinting from a dead stop. You’re accelerating into the zone so that when they hit the fly, they’re already at top-end speed and the thirty meters is spent purely at maximum velocity.

That’s the whole point. You’re taking the nervous system somewhere distance running never takes it. Not once. Not in a 5K, not in a mile, not in a tempo run.

Freshmen: two reps, and I’m watching posture, not the clock. Varsity: four or five reps, and I’m timing them, ranking them, and posting the results on the board.

That last part is not optional in my program. Kids will absolutely bring maximum effort to something with a number attached to it and a list on a wall. That’s not a character flaw, that’s just being seventeen.

Three. Short hill sprints. Six to eight seconds up a steep hill. Ten percent grade or better. Walk down slowly, two to three minutes, then go again.

This is my favorite because it’s self-correcting. On a steep enough hill, you physically cannot over-stride. The mechanics fix themselves. It’s the closest thing I’ve found to a drill that coaches itself while I’m dealing with whatever the actual crisis of the day is.

It’s also the answer for freshmen who aren’t ready for a barbell. It’s resistance training that doesn’t require a weight room, a spotter, or a conversation with your athletic director about liability.

Four reps for freshmen. Eight for varsity. Coach the arms. My cue is “pull the grass.”

Segment Five · Where It Goes in the Week

Now the practical problem. “Coach, my week is full. Where does this go?”

The answer comes from Charlie Francis, the Olympic sprint coach, and it’s called the high-low model. The idea is that you stack your hard stuff together on the same days and make your easy days genuinely easy. What kills athletes is not hard days. It’s the medium every day, forever.

Here’s what my week looks like.

Monday is high, and it’s neuromuscular. Wickets and flying 30s, then three easy miles to finish. Nervous system work on the freshest day of the week.

Tuesday is low. Thirty to forty-five minutes conversational, plus mobility. Real Zone 2. If they can’t talk in full sentences, they’re doing it wrong.

Wednesday is high, and it’s metabolic. Critical velocity intervals. Eight times a thousand at about 10K effort with a short jog recovery. This is the aerobic power day, and the key coaching point is don’t let them race it. The last rep should look like the first.

Thursday is low. Thirty minutes easy plus form drills. A-skips, B-skips, bounds. Stiff ankles, explosive contacts.

Friday is high, and it’s power. Six by eight-second hill sprints, walk down, two easy miles.

Saturday is the long run. Conversational. This is where the mitochondria get built and I am not touching it.

Sunday, they’re teenagers. Let them sleep.

Notice what that week is. Three high days, three low days, one off. The speed work sits on the high days where it belongs, next to the other hard things, so that the easy days can actually stay easy.

And notice what the speed work costs you. Monday’s sprinting is about four minutes of actual running. Friday’s is under a minute. You have not lost a single aerobic mile. You reorganized twenty minutes.

That’s the answer to “I don’t have time.” You have time. What you don’t have is a Tuesday you’re willing to admit is medium.

Segment Six · The Four Ways Coaches Break This

I want to cover the mistakes, because I’ve made all four and every one of them produces the conclusion “speed work doesn’t do anything.”

Mistake one. Putting it at the end of practice. The classic. Six by 100 after a seven-mile run, because that’s when there’s time. Your athletes are exhausted, they run every one at 85 percent, and you have just spent twenty minutes teaching their nervous system how to move slowly under fatigue. That’s not speed development, that’s the opposite of speed development with a stopwatch nearby.

Speed goes first, when they’re fresh, or it doesn’t go.

Mistake two. Calling strides speed work. I love strides. I put them at the end of easy runs, they belong there, and they do good things. But a stride is 80 to 90 percent, and Rule One says that’s not maximum velocity. Strides are seasoning. Flying 30s are the meal. Don’t tell yourself you’ve addressed speed because you added four strides on Thursday.

Mistake three. Cutting the rest. Coaches hate standing around. It feels unproductive, especially when the JV soccer team walks past and you’re standing in a field with fifteen kids doing nothing. So we cut the three minutes to ninety seconds, and now the second rep is slower than the first, and now we’re doing a lactate workout we didn’t plan and didn’t want.

Guard the rest. The rest is the workout.

Mistake four. Doing it in October two days before a championship meet. This is off-season and early-season work. It builds a ceiling over months. You do not install a new neuromuscular stimulus in your athletes’ legs during championship week and expect anything good. December, January, June, July. That’s the window. In season, you maintain it, you don’t build it.

Segment Seven · “Won’t This Get Them Hurt?”

Fair question, and it’s the one I get from parents. The instinct is that sprinting is dangerous. Hamstrings, right?

Here’s the reframe. A hamstring pull usually happens when an athlete asks their body to do something it hasn’t done in months. The kid who never sprints and then finds himself sprinting the last 200 of a cross country race, on tired legs, on grass, in a crowd, is the kid at risk.

Sprinting regularly, at full recovery, with good mechanics, is not the risk. It’s the vaccination.

And the durability argument goes further. Heavy loading and high ground forces build bone and tendon. The six-second hill sprint is one of the best structural investments you can make in a fourteen-year-old who isn’t ready for a barbell yet.

The runners who break down are almost never the ones with too much speed. They’re the ones with a big engine bolted to a chassis nobody reinforced.

Segment Eight · Monday Morning

Five things this week.

One. Move your fast stuff to the front of practice. Just that. Change nothing else and you’ve already improved it.

Two. Time something. A flying 30, a 40, whatever you’ve got. Write the numbers down. You cannot develop what you don’t measure, and your athletes will care more the second a number exists.

Three. Buy the mini hurdles. They’re cheap, they live in a bag, and they’ll outlast your career.

Four. Find your hill. You need one hill, ten percent or steeper, thirty meters long. Every school has one. Ours is behind the tennis courts and it is genuinely unpleasant, which is why it works.

Five. Tell your kids what you’re doing and why. Run them through the two-athlete math from earlier. When a distance runner understands that a faster 400 makes their 5K pace feel easier, they stop treating sprint day like a day off.

Close

So what happened to Danny?

He came back the next season and we did all of this. Wickets on Mondays, hills on Fridays, the whole thing. His weekly mileage barely moved. Same long run, same easy days, same everything.

His 400 went from 64 to 58. And his mile went from 4:38 to 4:24.

Now, I’m not going to stand here and tell you the sprinting did all of that. He was a year older, a year stronger, a year more experienced. That’s how high school works.

But I’ll tell you what he told me after the race, because it’s the line I’ve never forgotten.

He said, “Coach, the pace didn’t feel fast this year.”

Same pace. Different percentage of his ceiling. He wasn’t hanging on anymore. He was cruising, and he had something left when it mattered.

That’s speed reserve. It isn’t about making distance runners into sprinters. It’s about raising the roof so everything underneath it has room to breathe.

Build the engine. Then build the chassis to hold it. And for the love of everything, stop putting the sprints at the end of practice.

I’m Coach Saltmarsh. Sprint fast, run easy, and don’t confuse the two. Keep it salty, and I’ll see you next week.