Is the Hay in the Barn?

Our state championship for the scholastic outdoor season is tomorrow.  It's been a fun year which included trips to New York, Mobile, Houston, and still have trips to Greensboro and Orlando planned for the post season and summer track.  The training has been coming along and the kids are responding well in workouts The weather the past week has been pretty bad, but luckily we were tapering and could make arrangements to get the necessary work in.

Every season around this time I can't help but think back to a few years ago when a coach that I was working with on a group of long sprinters told me I shouldn't be doing a voluminous workout as close as a week out from the state meet.  I can remember I was doing some longer reps (400s) mixed with some shorter faster reps (100s and 200s) seven days before the championship (admittedly, I would have done a few things different now than I did then, I was not as well versed of a coach at that point!). Well after some discussion on what type of workouts we should be doing, to my dismay we backed off the workout and for the rest of the week did "strides."  The coach was emphatic that the "hay was in the barn" and we didn't need to maintain the quality.  At the state meet we ran nearly 5 seconds slower in the 4x400 and looked like we were simply not prepared to compete.

It would be later, after listening to talks from Boo Schexnayder, Joe Vigil, and a few others I realized that my tapering workouts were not exactly what they should have been, but the "hay is in the barn" approach was even worse.  An athlete needs to continue to train (with certain restraints) as the same intensity (normally near race pace) all the way through their last workout of the season in order to keep the legs sharp for performance.  Doing nothing but strides with sprinters did very little in the way of preparing those athletes for a championship caliber race.  Does the volume need to be as high?  No, it does not.  You can drop the volume of your workouts because it has been proven that Vo2 max can be maintained for an extended period, at least as long as your post season, with keeping the intensity of the training high.  The goal is to go into the championship races without tired legs, but they still need to be keen on the proper paces.

I would recommend finding what works for your team.  With my training I find that we do best when our last solid workout is 3 days out from our championship competitions, but each team may be different depending on training methods and fitness of their athletes.  But one thing I don't recommend is just going out and doing strides the week leading up to your important races.