High School Running Coach

Joan Hunter has put together a 37-page document, with details for every day from June 19th to the state cross country meet on November 10th, for members of Season 3 of HSRC.

Here is the first four pages of that document, the training from June 19th to July 1oth – click here to download the document.

Joan has shared the training of two different groups of athletes, based on age and ability, allowing you to see what the boys did, a group that not only won their state meet, but convincingly won the Nike Cross Nationals for the second year.

Joan and I shared a few emails after she sent this document. I’m including them here that provide insight into critical velocity (CV) paces. Tom “Tinman” Schwartz has had a big impact on Joan’s coaching and a cornerstone of his coaching a significant amount of work done at CV pace.

“Also, it would probably help if people knew I use Tom’s pace calculator to get kids’ paces for CV, threshold, etc. Everyone loves to think of CV pace as 10K pace (which makes them think that it is like Daniels cruise intervals or something) but really, for slower kids, CV pace is almost 5K pace since it is really 30-35 minute max effort race pace! So a beginner girl who runs 29 mins for 5K is going to run her CV reps fairly close to her race pace. Using the calculator for paces is a very important piece of our training.”

“One thing when working with CV pace, if you are using shorter races to plug into the calculator, you will get skewed results. Shorter races almost always spit out too fast of a pace.  5K is great, 3200 is OK, but Tom has formulas he uses to get CV pace for kids who race 800/1600 or shorter stuff. I usually look at CV pace using all the different formulas for a kid based on events and then sort of figure out a range.  Tom explains his formulas in his DVD training programs.

“…CV pace is the pace of a 30-35 min max effort and equates to 90% of VO2 max pace (don’t ask me how he calculates all this…)”

If you want to watch an 8-minute video of Tom talking about CV pace, click here.

And if you want to watch an 8-minute video of Joan talking about basic training concepts, click here.

To get the 37-page document, you need to become a member of Season 3 of HSRC. Click here to become a member.