The Time Crunched Coach

There are almost 20 events in track and field depending on what state you coach in, and all of which require a little to a very large amount of technical skills as well as a well thought out training program.  On top of that, a school is lucky to have 3 coaches or more which usually means a lot of coaching in various events that have unrelated training.  If you find yourself in a position where you have many events to train and have minimal help, don't despair.  There are ways you can plan your training schedule around a reasonable training program and still get nearly optimal results.  Here are five that may help you:

1) First, you must communicate with the athletes and stress the importance of self sufficiency on days when they can do work without a lot of time taken up by technical coaching, etc., such as distance run days for the distance runners and volume days for the sprinters (or short sprint days).  By teaching the athletes how to do the workouts on their own, it will allow you to focus on smaller groups each day.

2) Alternate workout days. If the sprinters workout hard on Tuesday and Thursday, have your distance runners workout Monday and Wednesday.  The other days the athletes can be doing recovery training which should be simple enough to work on their own.

3) Make workouts simple.  Instead of getting fancy, if you make your workouts concise and time efficient it will reduce the time you are spending with one group and may be able to work with another within the same practice.  One workout a local coach gave me for his middle distance runners that is really time efficient and works well in season is the 4 minute mile workout.  8x200 meter sprints done every minute (supposed to be 30 seconds on/30 off and is best for athletes around 2:00 or better for the 800) and the workout is over while another group may still be warming up!  Another one that is self sufficient is 30 meter sprints for sprinters.  Have your sprinters do 8x30 meter sprints from a standing start at max effort with 3-4 minute recovery.  This should not take up too much of your time.

4) Coach outside of practice.  Now this is a bit more difficult for many coaches, but some teams practice on Sundays or have 1-2 morning distance runs each week to make sure they are getting the training volume in.  Be careful with this because you need to take into account the athlete not mentally getting burned out by constant training.

5)  Group your athletes the best way possible.  A good setup for training may be 100-200 runners and jumpers in one group, 400-800 runners in another, and distance runners in the last group.  Some teams may split the 400-800 group into the distance or sprints, but just be careful that group is getting the training they need.  Grouping makes the workouts more clear cut in the goals for the day and will allow a coach to focus on larger groups.