You can feel it in the air. The humidity of August is a distant memory. There’s frost on the grass in New Hampshire, and the mornings are crisp enough to see your breath during warmups. It’s Championship Season! This is the payout. This is why we sweated through the summer and grinded through the mud…
The honeymoon is over. The warm, conversational miles of August are gone. The “first day of school” excitement has faded into the routine of homework and darkness falling a little earlier every day. The leaves in New Hampshire are starting to turn, and so is the mood of the season. We are now in the…
There is a specific smell to late August. It’s a mix of cut grass, humidity, and for a high school cross country coach, a cocktail of anxiety and teen spirit. The first day of practice is the great equalizer. You look out at the group and you see the full spectrum: the varsity veteran who…
Speed as a Skill: A Guide for Distance Runners The Problem with “Aerobic Base Only” Training Traditional high school distance training often produces athletes who are aerobically fit but mechanically broken. By prioritizing “aerobic base” while ignoring top-end speed, coaches inadvertently lower their athletes’ performance ceiling. The missing piece? Speed as a skill. While most…
Developing the Freshman Runner: A Career-Based Approach for High School Coaches Every August, a new group of freshmen arrives at practice. Among the natural talents, you inevitably find the “project” athlete: the kid who wants to run distance but currently lacks the coordination, speed, and aerobic capacity to be competitive. In a sport often obsessed…
How Lactate Threshold Training Fixes Your 5K Time (Stop Training Too Fast!) It’s a late summer tradition: enthusiastic high school runners hammering every single workout like it’s the state championship. The logic seems sound—to run a fast 5K, you need to run at 5K pace, right? Wrong. This approach produces exactly what you’d expect: tired…
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