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Full Video Transcript

[Music] and so I call this a paradigm shift because maybe you see in your training what I used to do so it doesn’t mean that I’m more correct than you or that I’m going to get different results in you as this I’m just going to show you what I changed and what I believe to be really good for our program okay so my first question I’d like to ask you do you consider your training system in track to be bottom-up or top-down because for the first 20 years of my coaching career I was a bottom-up coach and now the last ten years I’ve been a top-down coach so what do I mean by bottom-up okay we used to do speed workouts early and often high intensity workouts early and often there’s a local school in Utah who’s pretty famous for their Instagram account and they would show pictures of their kids laying dead all over the track after an intense workout in the middle of December and that’s kind of what our programs like high intensity workouts early and often when we hit speed we hit speed and our speed was an aerobic system emphasized and I I think personally for me this is one of the biggest I feel is one of the biggest mistakes in my career as a coach as that I always assumed that speed the word speed was totally an aerobic component and I think it’s a mistake for example would you consider if you put a kid in the 400 meter dash and he ran sixty that he was a good quarter mile er or would you consider that he had good speed a sixty in the corner that’s pretty stinky in it now if he does four of those in a row he’s one of ten boys in US history so what changes between a kid who runs 116 runs four it’s because he can hold pace it’s because he has the aerobic capacity to be able to hold pace for four laps instead of one and when I had this aha experience about 1011 years ago and it came about because of our success in cross country that changed everything I did in track and how I trained the boys I said hey we weren’t successful in cross country with this train let’s keep it going another thing with bottom up training is that I was trying to have two peaks during the season one for the end of indoor track so that’s why we are so intense we were doing hard quarters every couple weeks 200 meters 20 by 200 in January and trying to peek for Simplot games and then peak again outdoors there’s a lot of teams that I see they have great kids early season it outdoors or at the end of indoors they go to New Balance indoors their kids peak there or their kids peak at Arcadia because they’re training hard so that they can qualify for Arcadia and run at Arcadia and then with our training we’re just slamming them by the end of outdoors to be polite about it another thing I think is a kiva bottom up

Separated Event Groups

training is separated event groups now I’ve always had a really small group so I couldn’t afford to say oh you guys are the middle distance group and you guys are my two milers you’re my distance group but what I found out when we continued on our aerobic engine training is that I didn’t need to separate my event groups I just trained all of them as distance runners you guys are the distance squad and guess what during the season you’re gonna get to run a 400 you’re gonna get to run eight hundreds and what I found out is we’re gonna see during the slides today is that the the greater the aerobic engine they had not only did I have a great two-mile group but those guys became my best milers and my and my best 800 meter guys and some of them you know every year half the guys at least half the guys on our 4×4 were distance guys okay another thing with bottom-up training is that an

Intensive Racing Schedule

intensive racing schedule we had a kid this summer he was the 1a state champ last year from Monticello which is way down in the southeast corner of Utah across from the Colorado border it’s on the way to Albuquerque go through dove Creek and Cortez and then down through Farmington and his dad started teaching or coaching their team and so he got high school running coach yeah he caught asked me it at BYU invite what can I do and I turned him on to high school running coach I said all our workouts there you’ve got track workouts from the top coaches in the state so he started doing those workouts and this last summer his son who is state champ as a junior he came up and he had his grandparents live in American Fork so he came up and trained with us all summer long and then he would tell his dad what they were doing and they had two really good freshmen this summer they worked hard all summer they’d never done a summer before but they were following our workouts and in one a state they went one two three four with two freshmen and won a state our schools under 80 something like that they went one two three four in the 1a race so that’s the thing I see in bottom up training and six something we we think about when we’re tapering for region tapering for state and during you know when you’re racing maybe two three days a week because you have a duel or try meet and then on the weekends you’ve got a big invite maybe a two-day invite is that weedy emphasize of aerobic training as the season progresses and coach Gary the the one thing I saw yesterday that hit my eye was D training and that’s something that you know we’re we’re separating the the for things and lyddiard training into and we compartmentalize each of the each of our training blocks so this is what I’ve got to concentrate on instead of realizing that you’ve got to work on all four components of distance running all year long and so those are what I considered what I was doing for the first 20 years of my coaching career and I call it bottom up training now in contrast to that what’s top down training first off as I said I I can’t afford to distinguish between training groups there’s no distinguishing everybody works together every workout okay the second thing is I’m thinking I’m going to continue what we did in cross-country because the boys are comfortable with it they know it and they’re seeing success so I’m going to focus on developing our aerobic engine and we also work on our strength component right now we still do the grinder every Monday we still do a power all we’re doing right now for speed besides after our hour after our intermediate runs we always do stride laps every day after an intermediate run we’re we do one power run a week we do our long run on Saturday now this weekend there’s an optional meet it’s club sport indoors as a club sport in Utah so boys don’t have to go to a meet if they don’t want to my team captains are taking care of practice yesterday and well Thursday afternoon yesterday and today so they were in charge of the long run this morning the other thing that I tried to focus on is I try to work really hard to teach

Teach Pace

pace and I like to paraphrase Chevy Chase and Caddyshack feel the pace be the pace I want them to get in grade I mean I had I was blessed with great coaches coach Gary was talking about Lila Beatty is my junior college coach we would go to the University of Illinois indoor track at the Armory and coach would say today we’re doing 400s you’re going to do eight 400s at 72 and I could hit every single one at 72 if he changed and said okay now we’re going to do some at 68 I could hit exactly 68 I had internalized pace in my brain in my body and that’s what I do with my athletes we focus our when we start doing repeats we concentrate on pace so that they don’t be the crazy freshman that goes out in 65 in an 800 when they’re PR is 220 or they go out in 70 in a mile when they’ve never broken five minutes so we work all out of that because your kids are going to race how they train so you’ve got to prepare them in their training so that they are confident they’re racing the next thing is that we consider even though we have races indoors and we go to Simplot games that’s our last endorsee of meat we consider January through March in our champ training exactly like June through August and I was talking to Bill Eris we’ve become good friends at Nationals and I was talking about this to him and he goes absolutely and he couldn’t come he wanted to come and teach here but they have an official season I’m sure some of you also do where they have an official state championship it is a sanctioned and regulated sport in the state of New York and so he had to work this this weekend with his athletes they had a meet and he couldn’t make it but he still trains his kids through this three-month block so instead of trying to peek for twice in six months we only have two peaks all year long state meet in cross country state meet and track everything else after those things is icing on the cake and the and one thing I’m going to talk about specifically today and I’m going to use KC clinger as an example since he was our 402 miler and two-time nxn champion and has done some incredible things in his career he was the his first semester at BYU he plays 24th at NC double-a was the top freshman their first 10k he ever ran was at nationals