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 Cross Country Meets Are Scored: A Parent’s Guide to Understanding the Numbers Your kid just finished their first cross country race. You saw them cross the finish line somewhere in the middle of the pack, collapse on the grass, and now you’re staring at a results sheet covered in numbers that might as well…
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…
Developing Young Distance Runners: Talent, Patience, and Burnout An eighth-grader showed up to my first practice wearing basketball shorts and generic running shoes from Kohl’s. He’d never run competitively. Didn’t know what a PR was. Couldn’t tell you the difference between a 400 and an 800. But when we did our baseline mile time trial,…
Mastering 5K Race Strategy: A Science-Backed Guide for Coaches I stood at the one-mile mark of a divisional championship 5K watching one of my best runners—someone who had trained flawlessly for twelve weeks—blow up spectacularly. She’d gone out in 5:45 for the first mile when her fitness supported 6:05. By two miles, she was shuffling…
Managing Parents in HS Sports: A Coach’s Communication Guide I’ll never forget the text message I received at 10PM on a Tuesday before the first day of school: “Why wasn’t my daughter in the top seven at today’s workout? She ran a 6:45 mile last spring. This doesn’t make sense.” The workout itself was simple—a…
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