The Six Weeks That Decide Your Spring

Full Transcript

The Six Weeks That Decide Your Spring

Cold Open

The season ended on a Saturday.

By Sunday night, a parent has emailed. What should my daughter be doing now?

By Monday, the athlete has texted. Coach, can I start running again?

They want the same answer, and it’s shorter than either of them expects.

But here’s what I want you to hear first. Every March, a coach somewhere finds out that the best runner on the team has a sore shin.

It’s the first week of outdoor practice. She feels great. She’s coming off a good indoor season, fitter than she’s ever been. And yet she’s got shin pain that she can point to with a single finger.

That’s what this episode is about.

Intro

Welcome to Salty Talks. I’m Coach Saltmarsh, 25 years coaching, 31 state champions, and this is season number two of Salty Talks.

Season one followed the cross country season, from the first summer run to the championship. Season two starts the day after: the winter.

From the last cross country race to the first outdoor meet is about 20 weeks. That’s the longest block of training a high school distance runner ever gets. And most programs waste it in one of two ways. They either take the whole thing off, or they race indoors every Saturday and show up in March already tired.

Today is the first six weeks, and here’s why I start there. Weeks one through six look the same whether you have an indoor season or not. Bone doesn’t care about your meet schedule.

So today: the break itself, the easy week, the three-week hold, and the kids who need a different plan. Five things to do on Monday.

Let’s go.

The Break · Weeks One and Two

Well, Coach, the season’s over. I hope you had a successful one. I hope your kids had fun. I hope they come back next year and encourage others to join your team too.

If you’re like me, you’re probably feeling a little tired, and I’m sure your runners are as well. It’s a long season, and every Saturday the stakes get higher and higher. It takes a little bit out of you every week, not only physically but emotionally as well.

So the best thing you can tell your kids after the season is over is to take a break. A week, two weeks, ten days: they all seem kind of arbitrary. The point is you need some time to relax, but you don’t want to have your athletes go sit on the couch for two weeks. You want them to almost do something similar to a backwards taper. Take a week off, and then start up easy again. Get back into running, or maybe they’re going to play some other winter sport.

Just don’t have them sit still, because the kid who literally sits on the couch and stops running is going to come back stiff and heavy and out of rhythm. So have them move. Walk the dog, take a hike, ride a bike, shoot baskets. If you’re here in New England, you can shovel snow. None of it is timed. None of it’s logged. Tell them to put the Garmin in the drawer.

And if one of your runners from cross country decides they want to play a winter sport, good. The American Academy of Pediatrics tells young athletes to take time away from a single sport during the year. And there was a study done at Stanford of high school runners: boys who had played basketball after running had fewer stress fractures in the spring. A basketball season is one of the best things that can happen to a distance runner in December. It’s okay to mix it up.

So there are two things that you should tell your families. You can put it in an email home after the season, when you congratulate everybody and thank the boosters and the parents and the athletes, and then drop it on them. One week to ten days, no running.

Some of them will push back on this, and you as a coach should push back on them. What you don’t want is to have that athlete show up in March for outdoor track with an injury they sustained because they never took a break at the end of cross country season.

Also very important: they need their sleep, and they need to continue to eat. They should not restrict their food just because they’re out of season. Winter is where under-fueling starts, and it starts with that type of logic. If you haven’t heard of RED-S, which is a really serious condition, primarily in female athletes, it centers a lot around the necessity to continue to eat and to fuel themselves. And if you haven’t heard that episode, check it out.

Then there’s the mental part. Kids need to come back and be themselves again, and have fun, and laugh and smile. Say a kid shows up to indoor track who’s usually a funny kid, who likes to talk it up with you or the other kids on the team, and they just seem kind of flat. Or maybe you haven’t heard them laugh for a little while. Chances are that kid is pretty worn out. This is a good time to encourage them to take some time off. They don’t need to keep pushing just for the sake of pushing.

The motivated kid who keeps training through the break is usually one of your best. She’ll make excuses. “I just want to stay sharp, Coach. I’m not really going that fast.” But those miles are the same miles that produce that February injury.

Week two, after a week of not doing much of anything, is where you start some easy, unstructured running. No strides, no watch still, no workouts, no long run. Just a few miles a day. Just moving the legs, just reminding themselves that they’re runners. The only goal is to feel normal again. For somebody who maybe ran 40 miles a week in cross country, that’s probably something like 15 miles in their first week back.

And not everybody takes a break. Somebody who didn’t run cross country this fall has nothing to recover from. Rest is recovery from something. If there was no something, there’s nothing to recover from. So if you’ve got kids trying out for indoor track, or kids who want to start winter training and haven’t done anything this fall, now’s a great time to get started.

Really, a coach’s job is to train the individual, and every individual comes to you with a little bit different story.

Segment Three · Weeks Three to Five, the Hold

Week three is where structured training starts, and the first thing it does is nothing. It holds. It maintains.

Here’s week three for that 40-mile kid. Let’s say 22 miles, five days of running. Every step of that run is at Chat pace, which is nice, easy talking pace. Strides after three of the easy runs. Two short strength sessions after a run. That’s it.

Week four is the same. Week five is the same. That’s not a typo. That’s a plan.

Notice what’s missing. No intervals, no tempos, no time trials to see where everybody’s at. No quality until the volume has been rebuilt.

So what’s the greatest concern? Why are we holding for three weeks? Bone density and bone health are the greatest concern with young high school runners coming off a demanding cross country season.

When you load bone harder than it’s used to, tiny cracks start to form, and that’s normal. That’s a signal to adapt. The body sends in cells to clear out the damaged bone first, and then it lays down new bone in its place.

But here’s the catch. Stuart Warden at Indiana University has written the clearest version of this. In dense bone like the shin, the clearing takes about four weeks. The rebuilding can take three months. In between, the bone is more porous than it was before you loaded it. It’s more vulnerable, not less. So bone stress injuries tend to show up three to four weeks after a big jump in load.

Now put that next to a normal winter calendar. Most plans add miles every week or every other week, and it feels like progress. The kids feel great. So you add three miles one week and then three more two weeks later. The second jump lands right in the hole the first one dug, and nothing hurts.

Here’s why. The heart and the muscles adapt so much faster than bone does. Those are the parts that make the kid feel great. So she feels strong right up until the day she doesn’t.

There’s a study that shows this pattern. Researchers followed two Division I programs for seven years. 221 distance runners. 154 bone stress injuries. Shin and thigh bone injuries peaked in the early part of each competitive season. Not at the end, when they were most tired. At the start, when they were building miles and racing at the same time. And the women’s rate was more than double the men’s: 45 per 100 athletes, against 20 on the men’s side.

That’s the fingerprint of a bad build. And that’s a college program with full-time athletic trainers. Your odds working in a high school aren’t any better.

So through week nine, every volume step holds for three weeks. After that, the bone has caught up, and you can move to two-week steps with a down week every fourth.

One more thing for these weeks. Weeks fall apart. Holidays, exams, snowstorms, missed buses, sickness. When that happens, use the same rules from the taper episode. Cut the volume and keep the frequency. Four 20-minute runs are better than two 45-minute runs. Keep the strides. They take four minutes, and they’re the last thing we want to cut. And never make up a missed week. Just rejoin the calendar wherever the calendar is.

Segment Four · Week Six and the Kids Who Need a Different Plan

Week six is the first step up. That 40-mile kid goes from 22 to 28 and holds there for another three weeks. Then 34. Same idea, one held step at a time.

And week six is your deadline for one decision. Week seven is where the plan splits. Does your program race an indoor season that counts, with a championship at the end? Or not? Those are two very different winters. One has two peaks. One is a single long build. Running the wrong one is the most common winter mistake I see.

Weeks one to six are the same on purpose. You have to decide calmly, at the end of week six, what the next part of the winter looks like.

Now the athletes. Most of your roster fits that plan. A few don’t, and they’re the ones who get hurt.

So set the level by cross country peak week. Not their grade. Not their talent. Not what the kid thinks she can handle. A kid between two levels goes in the lower one. A kid who was hurt this fall goes one level lower than her mileage says, however good she feels right now. And talent is not durability. The athlete most likely to get hurt in your program is the gifted sophomore whose ambition outruns her tendons.

Second, the kid with a past stress fracture. That same Stanford study followed 748 high school runners. A prior stress fracture was the strongest predictor of the next one, for girls and for boys. It’s also the easiest risk factor to find. You just ask them. If the answer is yes, they go one level lower, and they move slower than the calendar. Not for a few weeks. For the whole winter.

And third, the kid who isn’t eating enough. Winter is the window. Holidays scramble meals, the days are short, appetite sometimes drops in the cold, and the miles are going up. Remember that the women’s injury rate was more than double. Fueling is a training issue, and the conversation belongs in November, not in March. And the body questions go home to families in a letter. Coaches don’t talk about that.

Fourth, the late arrival. The basketball player or the swimmer who finishes in late February. She can’t jump into week 16 with everybody else, but she wants to get a little time on the track. She wants to start running again. So start her at week two of the No Fall Season plan and squeeze the first six weeks into four. Her heart’s ready. Her bones are not.

And lastly, know when it stops being your call. Pain in one small spot that she can point to with one finger. Pain that gets sharper as the run goes on. Pain that hasn’t settled in two weeks. That’s not an easy week. And it’s not cross-training to see how it goes. That’s a doctor. Caught early, a bone stress injury costs only a few weeks. Caught late, it can cost somebody the entire season.

Segment Five · Monday Morning

Five things that you can do this week.

One. Send the letter home before the first parent emails you. Ten days off, then one easy week, and why. Sleep more. Eat normally. The letter I use is free at coachsaltmarsh.com/breakletter. You can put your own dates in it. You can put your own team information in it. Feel free to use it.

Two. Write week one on the calendar for every athlete. It’s the week after her last race, not the team’s. Then write in the next five weeks: ten days off, one easy week, three weeks that hold, and then the first step up.

Three. Ask every athlete two questions, one on one. First, have you ever had a stress fracture? And second, does anything hurt right now? Then set each kid’s level by their cross country peak week. When in doubt, go lower.

Four. Decide your path before week seven. Indoor season, or one long build. You decide. Write it down. Just don’t decide in January.

And five. Tell your team the plan out loud. Weeks three to five are going to feel slow. It’s on purpose. In the taper episode, I said kids don’t trust a taper when they don’t understand it. It’s the same thing with a hold. Explain it once in November, and you won’t spend January defending it.

Close

Back to that parent’s email, and that text you got from the athlete.

Here’s the answer, the short one. Ten days off. Keep moving, sleep, eat. Then one easy week, and then three weeks that feel too slow. That’s six weeks total. And it’s where the kid you’ll see in March gets decided. Not the workouts in April. Not the first meet. These six weeks are crucial.

The shin in March was a November decision. So make it on purpose.

Everything I covered today is free in the winter training guide on my site. If you want all 20 weeks written out day by day, both paths for all four levels of runners, with the letter home and the cold policy template, that’s in my Winter Training Block at coachsaltmarsh.com/winter.

Next time: the postseason debrief, the 15-minute talk to have with every runner while the season is still fresh in their minds.

I’m Coach Saltmarsh. Remember to build it slowly. Keep it salty, and I’ll see you on the next one.