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Full Video Transcript

[Music] okay the next thing is capillary runs

Capillary Runs

this is I think one of the two most important things that we actually change and train the other things were structural how do we change you know the the whole the whole team the whole what we do with our program but this is down to nuts and bolts when I started coaching I think our longest run that we did with the boys is maybe eight miles and I remember doing with one of my top runners we ran all the way down to downtown Salt Lake City to West High School because their football was playing there and then we got a ride back on the bus from to Murray from West High School on the bus and it was nine and a half miles it’s like that was those were the longest runs we did and reading in in Lydiard it’s like oh you got to go longer than that and I didn’t understand why that the importance of of a long run so to help my student my runners understand why we need to do long runs because a lot of kids especially I was like I don’t they’ve all run at the junior high maybe three miles or four miles so I call them capillary runs and one thing that really influenced me in the summer 2008 track coach magazine they had a reprint of an article on capillaries ation from a British Journal and I was talking about this in California a couple years ago and a coach came up or emailed me and said hey where do you get a copy of that and so I checked with track coach magazine is published by track and field news so I checked with them and you can buy back issues of track and field or of track coach magazine from track and field news but the only one that they don’t have in stock over the last 25 years is the summer 2008 and I lent mine out to a coach probably about ten years ago and I never got it back so I don’t even have a copy but there’s a lot of really good stuff online if you just put in capillaries ation so what is capillaries

What Is Capillaries Ation

ation okay so the idea is you need to put your body underneath underneath underneath enough stress for a long enough period so that it’s going to adapt to that so we need to have an aerobics stress put on between 70 and 90 minutes for the body to say hey I’m being stressed for a long time I need to change something and so the body starts building capillaries into the muscle tissue and into the lung tissue so that it can get more oxygen to the lungs so that’s the process of capillaries ation and so what do we want to do we want a 426 Hemi with an 871 blower on top you know you put dual quads eight hundred CFM dual quads on top that’s 1600 cubic feet per minute of oxygen going in we need to get the oxygen to the muscle and so we started when I started AF we started linking out to about ten miles well if you’re going six-minute mile pace then it’s only 60 minutes so that wasn’t enough time period to get your body to react and I was in a coaches clinic with Paul Pilkington who’s the one of the coaches at Weber State he coached for years at University of Illinois you might recall some of you were older in about 1990 he won the he was hired as the the rabbit at the LA Marathon they had all of these big named marathoners there and so he was going out and they didn’t stay with him and a halfway through the race he said hey I feel good so he went on won the race and and all of them all of the pro runners were like well that’s not fair and they were whining complaining about the rabbit winning the race and so he was being interviewed on ESPN he had a hat that said whining with a circle and a cross through it so he put that on our cross country shirts the next year no whining but I was at a coaches clinic and he said seventy to ninety minutes and and I was reading in a lot of other things and that’s about what everybody all the physiologists agree so that’s one thing that we started up instead of going 10 miles instead of going 8 miles for our capillary runs we went 2 minutes now high school kids are high school kids so what will they do 70 minutes they’ll go out 35 minutes and then they’ll come back in 35 minutes and that get the minimum amount of time if they are young they’ll come back slower and one of the mantras on our program is that we always want negative splits because I had a group about 2005 2006 2006 and I would go out with them and I would come back in the same pace and they would come back like two minutes later I’m like wait this isn’t right you race how you trade so if you’re slowing down on all your runs then you’re gonna race that way you’re gonna slow down during the race because that’s what you’ve conditioned your mind to tell you to do and so we tell the kids you know we want to come back when negative split so if they go out in 35 minutes they might come back in 33 and then they’ll get more mileage running around the school on the grass or on the track or something and so whatever miles they got out like a lot of time for my varsity boys especially now in its winter they might make five and a half miles out in their first 35 minutes and they’ll come back and they’ll they’ll get six six six miles six and a quarter back and then the smart ones they’ll take an easy jog and get maybe up to 12 12 and a half I have had some guys

Connor Mcmillan

Connor McMillan when he was a senior we went on a Canyon run for a capillary over spring break and he started dropping like five tens and he got oh his goal he said for his high school career was to get 13 miles on a capillary run he made it in about 72 minutes 13 miles and he’s run 2810 at BYU so I think it kind of helped and the other thing we used to like to do is there’s some really good donut shops that are about five six miles away from the school so we’d do a donut run and we actually the boys have a secret stash they put all the points because they didn’t want to come back with their coins so that secret places by the donut shop where they keep all their change and so we go there have a donut and then run all the way back and so if you need motivation for kids donuts and that motivated me to be out there in the morning too so yes it’s the state pace yeah well you know Coach rink you see always said you know if all you do is long slow distance because people thought LSD meant long slow distance if all you do is long slow distance all you ever be as a long slow distance runner so for us sustained pace they might start out at 7:30 and gradually my varsity guys our goal is aerobic threshold pace so that’s about six minute pace for us for high school boys varsity you know and so for them to average six minutes they’ll start dropping 555 s550s the better guys on Casey and Casey clinger and those boys they would be down 5:35 20s drop down maybe five tens like Connor did and and they would get 12 12 and a half miles in 70 minutes but then they would go an easy mile get eighty minutes I’ve had some guys strive to 90 but the the goal is come back faster than you went out and two seconds faster on the way back than way out that’s the success there’s been a lot of capillary ruins where I ran back and got two seconds faster on the way back for me I was glad because even if you do that that means they’ve sustained their pace for the whole run and you know at least they’re not slowing down and coming back slower and that’s the one thing we’re trying to overcome you