Grouping Your Athletes

One issue that often comes up in track, but to a lesser extent cross country, is what training group to put athletes in.  You have an athlete than can help you in sprint relays, but is a long sprinter or even middle distance runner in their most competitive events.  Or sometimes you have guys who run the same events but come from different backgrounds of training, especially in the 400 and 800. Well, in order to place these athletes in the right training group you need to evaluate your own team.

Smaller teams will tend to have more encompassing training groups such as all sprint events in one group and all distance events in another which may break off somewhere at the 400-800 mark.  I've even seen some teams that were so small that there was only one training group (not that I recommend this, but apparently the coach figured even the distance runners needed to train with the sprinters).  Large teams may be able to break training groups into short sprints, hurdles, long sprints, and distance. Really large teams may even have coaches for all those groups.  You need to think about how breaking down your groups would benefit you before you even assign an athlete to a specific group.

Now that you know how many groups you have, or rather what groups is specifically training for which events, you can figure out how to place your runners.  One thing to remember is that this does not have to be a hard rule on who is training with which group.  You may switch an athlete depending on which day of the week it is and what the training goal of your workout is.  Consider the strengths and weaknesses of an athlete when grouping them.  The goal of grouping is workout optimization so place your athletes where you think they will gain the fitness to have their best season possible.