Sean Brosnan’s Training System: The Newbury Park Blueprint
In 2016, Sean Brosnan walked into Newbury Park High School cross country and told his athletes and their parents something no coach in that program’s history had ever said with credibility: we are going to win a state championship within four years.
The program had not qualified for the California State Championships in 25 years. There was no reasonable basis for that statement.
By 2022, Newbury Park had won three consecutive national championships.
Brosnan’s book documenting how it happened, Beyond Fast: How a Renegade Coach and His Unlikely High School Team Revolutionized Distance Running (co-written with Chris Lear and Andrew Greif, published 2025), pulls back the curtain on a training system most coaches have heard about and few fully understand. This article breaks down what Brosnan actually does, why it works, and how you can apply the principles to your own program.
Why This Dynasty Matters to You
The easy response to Newbury Park is to assume it happened because of California talent pools, weather, and resources most programs don’t have. Those factors exist. They don’t explain what Brosnan built.
Talent pools don’t explain a program that was irrelevant for 25 years until one coach arrived. Weather doesn’t explain training choices that contradict what most coaches do. Resources matter, but Brosnan didn’t invent the altitude camp or the double session. He made specific, documented decisions about how to structure training, and those decisions are replicable in principle by any coach willing to examine their assumptions.
The Newbury Park system challenges three beliefs most coaches hold without questioning: that base training should be slow, that the 7-day week is the natural training cycle, and that mileage accumulation is the primary driver of development in high school cross country.
The Background: Building From Zero
Brosnan arrived at Newbury Park with a coaching background that included formative time in Portland, Oregon, where he was exposed to the training approaches of Alberto Salazar and Jerry Schumacher. Both built professional-level systems around continuous quality development and the progressive repetition of similar workouts over time. Neither believed in strict periodization that removed entire energy systems from training for months at a time.
Brosnan brought that philosophy to a program starting from nothing and declared an aggressive timeline. The declaration wasn’t marketing. It was a coaching philosophy made public. When you tell athletes and parents you will win a state title in four years, you commit to a development arc rather than a reactive approach. You are saying: I know what this program needs, I know how to build it, and the timeline is four years, not four months.
Athletes and families responded. A culture formed around that shared belief, and the training system had something to work with.
The Training System Breakdown
Mileage: Quality Over Volume
Brosnan has been asked repeatedly about his athletes’ mileage. The numbers consistently surprise coaches who assume national champions need 70–80 mile summer builds.
His top athletes reach 60–70 miles per week by senior year. Colin Sahlman, who set national high school records under Brosnan, trained under 60 miles per week throughout his career. The highest single week ever logged by any athlete in the program: 64 miles.
The highest-mileage weeks come in October, during the competitive season, not during summer base building. That is the opposite of what most programs do.
Summer isn’t a mileage accumulation period for Brosnan. It’s when athletes build toward the quality October demands. Mileage climbs to a point and holds. Quality is what advances.
The 10-Day Training Cycle
This is the structural innovation most coaches focus on when they study Brosnan, and for good reason. He doesn’t train in 7-day weeks.
His training runs on a 10-day cycle. The long run comes every 10 days instead of every 7, and quality sessions are distributed within that structure rather than forced into the calendar week every coach inherits.
The practical effect is significant. A 7-day week forces a hard workout on day six because the schedule says so, whether or not the athlete has recovered from day three. A 10-day cycle lets the coach prescribe training based on actual recovery. Athletes aren’t dragged into a quality session before they’ve adapted to the last one.
Elite athletes in the program also doubled three times per cycle, pairing a morning shakeout with an evening supplemental session, and one complete rest day was preserved in every 10-day cycle.
Conjugate Periodization: All Systems, All Year
Brosnan’s biggest conceptual departure from standard high school coaching is his rejection of periodization as most coaches practice it.
Traditional high school XC periodization looks like this: summer is the base phase (long, slow distance, no fast running), September and October are the build phase (tempo work begins, race-specific fitness develops), and November is the peak phase (workouts sharpen, mileage drops). Each phase has a primary focus, and the other systems are set aside.
Brosnan runs a conjugate model in which every energy system gets a training stimulus year-round. The ratios shift. Speed work is a smaller share of training in July than in October, but it is never removed.
On the conventional base phase, he has said: “I always hate the word base phase. I like to do everything year-round, and to me it’s all progression.”
Here’s what that looks like in practice. Athletes start running 1000-meter repeats in July at 2:56 each. By November, the same workout is run at 2:46. Over 16 weeks, that’s 10 seconds per repeat. The workout hasn’t changed. The fitness has.
This mirrors the Salazar and Schumacher philosophy directly: repeat the same workouts and progress them, rather than cycling through entirely different stimuli and hoping the body pulls it all together at championship time.
Surface: Soft Surfaces as Non-Negotiable
Brosnan banned concrete from his athletes’ training. That isn’t a general preference. It’s a structural decision with logistical consequences.
The program used volunteer drivers to get athletes to soft-surface training locations. When a coach values something enough to build logistics around it, athletes understand it’s serious. Stress fractures from pounding concrete didn’t derail the dynasty because the training environment didn’t allow concrete running.
Hip and glute strengthening and ankle mobility work were built into the core of training, not tacked on as optional extras. Injury prevention was designed into the week, not left as an afterthought.
Altitude Camps
Regular camps at Big Bear Lake, California, nearly 7,000 feet up, added an altitude stimulus on top of the training load. Just as important was the psychological effect of training somewhere separate from the daily school routine.
The Philosophy Behind It
The Brosnan philosophy comes down to one principle: touch every system continuously and progress the quality of each.
Most coaches are afraid to run fast during base phase because they believe fast running demands more recovery and will interrupt aerobic development. Brosnan argues that’s only true when the fast running is poorly designed. Short, controlled speed work that doesn’t generate significant lactate doesn’t compromise aerobic training. It maintains the neuromuscular patterns that make fast running possible.
“I always like to do everything year-round,” he has said. “I don’t set boundaries. We really don’t. We just go after what we want.”
That last sentence matters. It was said to high school athletes who had no reason to believe their program would win anything. The coach’s belief in what they could do came before any evidence that they could do it. Brosnan was coaching culture and training at the same time, and the two were inseparable.
What Most Coaches Get Wrong
The typical high school program runs slow all summer, adds tempo work in September, and then wonders why athletes who look great in October fall apart in November. The answer is almost always the same: speed came too late, mileage peaked too early, and athletes arrived at championships slightly fatigued instead of sharp.
Brosnan’s system inverts this. Speed is present from July. Mileage peaks in October, not August. Athletes arrive at championships having done their hardest, fastest work in the four weeks before the meet, not six.
The failure I see most often in high school programs is the early-season mileage spike. Coaches are excited in July, athletes are fresh, and the temptation is to build fast. Then September arrives, athletes are carrying fatigue from an August peak, workouts suffer, confidence drops, and coaches try to solve a training problem with more training. The Brosnan model says to plan the peak for when it matters, not for when you’re most motivated to train.
How to Apply This to Your Program
You don’t need to recreate the full Newbury Park system tomorrow. These are the elements that transfer most directly to a program with ordinary constraints.
1. Try a 10-day cycle for one training block.
Run your August block on a 10-day structure, scheduling quality sessions and long runs by recovery rather than day of the week. At the end, ask whether your athletes showed up to quality sessions fresher than usual. If they did, consider adopting the structure permanently.
2. Add one speed development session per week to your summer base.
It doesn’t need to be a formal workout. After an easy run, add 6 to 8 repetitions of 100 meters at 90–95 percent effort with full recovery between each. It takes about fifteen minutes and preserves the neuromuscular qualities that make October workouts more effective. A summer of twice-weekly strides plus one short speed session produces a different athlete in September than a summer of nothing but slow running.
3. Set a mileage ceiling, not a target.
Brosnan’s 64-mile ceiling wasn’t arbitrary. It was the upper limit where his athletes could train and recover without injury. Most high school coaches set mileage targets and push athletes toward them whether or not recovery is happening. Instead, set the ceiling about 10 percent above what your athletes currently handle sustainably, hold it, and progress quality inside it.
4. Get off concrete for at least half your training.
You may not have volunteer drivers, but you almost certainly have a grass field, trail, or gravel path within reach. Start by making one easy run per week a deliberate soft-surface run, then track injuries in your program over two seasons. The data will be persuasive.
5. Tell your athletes where this is going.
Brosnan told his athletes they would win a state title in four years. You can adapt that. Tell your incoming freshmen what you’re building, what the process is, and what a four-year commitment looks like. Athletes who understand the purpose of their training perform it differently than athletes following instructions they don’t understand.
The Bottom Line
Newbury Park wasn’t always great. It was invisible for 25 years. Then a coach arrived who had thought carefully about what training should look like, said the goal out loud, and built a system to reach it over four years.
That system has specific, learnable elements: a 10-day cycle, year-round speed work, a mileage ceiling instead of a mileage target, soft surfaces as a requirement, and the progressive repetition of quality sessions across the full year.
Three national championships later, the system is documented. The question is whether you’re willing to challenge the assumptions producing whatever results your program is getting now.
The 24-week training system that takes your athletes from June through November is laid out in full in High School Cross Country Training: The Championship Blueprint. If Brosnan’s approach to periodization changed how you think about the training year, the Blueprint gives you the week-by-week architecture to apply those principles to your season.
