Training To Be Your Best: February 3rd-9th

With much apologies for missing the Monday workout, I give you the rest of the week.  I got wrapped up in a great article that will be out soon, so be ready for a great read on here within a day. I hope this crazy winter weather isn't keeping you off track too much.  If you miss a day or two, or need to change the schedule around, that is fine.  If you rolling into your state meet in the next few weekends, try your best, but remember you will not be in amazing shape in the winter compared to what you will be in the spring.

Monday- What you diligently ran this week.
Tuesday- 3x1 Mile with 5 minutes jogging recovery. Strength Workout A.
Wednesday- 45 minutes easy, 8x strides
Thursday- 40x Strides (Keep this at an Up-Tempo effort with recovery no longer than necessary).  Full warmup.  Strength Workout B
Friday- 35 minutes easy, 8x strides
Saturday- Track Meet or 2 Mile Time Trial
Sunday- Off

Legend:
Warm Up- A few minutes jogging, dynamic stretching, a few strides
Easy- A pace you can handle and have a conversation at the same time. Relaxed.
Tempo Run- A distance run at a pace of 5k race pace plus 30 seconds per mile.
Ins and Outs- Striding the straights and jogging the turns on the track
Strides- Not a sprint! Simply a short pickup of 50-100 meters at around 1-2 mile race pace. Full recovery.
Sprints- Not a stride! This is near maximal effort (while maintaining control of your body). Form is crucial in this type of running.
Progression Run- Training done at progressive pace that increases throughout the run. Begin at an easy pace and finish at 5k race effort or so for the last few minutes.
Fartlek- A run of varied pace for varied time which can be anywhere from an easy jog to hard sprinting.
Hills- Not all out sprints, good paced effort around 5k race effort. Can be anywhere between 100-400 meters long.
Workout A- 10-30x pushups, 10-30x prisoner squats, 10-30x lunges, 10-30x crunches, 30-60 seconds of planks on each side and the middle, and 30-60 seconds of Australian crawl.
Workout B- 20-40x step ups, 5-20x tricep pushups, 30-60 seconds of bridging, 10-20x dips, 30-60 seconds of pedestal, and 30-60 seconds of scissor kicks.
Pacing Calculator from McMillan

Knowledge Is Power: October 18th

Here are a few articles you can sneak in between meets and football this weekend:

Throwback Thursday: Matthew Elliott by Running Times- Why it matters: Elliott is such a great guy who had a very inspirational interview after his fourth place finish at the US champs this summer where he had to walk away after a happy, tearful breakdown.  He was only a 4:42 miler in high school. He should be the model for what the sport is really about.

Matt Elliott after a victory.

Mead High School 20 Years Ago by Dyestat- Why it matters:  I've always believed that we should know where the sport has come from in the past so we can see if we are improving or regressing, and we should also use others as a lesson.  Mead was one of the best teams in the 90s and Doug Binder explores them a bit here.

Can You Talk Yourself Out of Exhaustion? by RunnersWorld- Why it matters:  Finding an edge in performance is always important, and here is a chance to understand a way you can improve without even doing any more training!  Take a look.

Competitor Groups Decision by Flotrack- Why it matters:  This is another post about the situation with Competitor group not supporting elite athletes anymore.  I don't usually agree with Flotrack, but this is worth considering.

Nutrition by Athletics Weekly- Why it matters: People are always asking me about nutritional advice and I usually yield to better sources of information since I'm a coach, not a nutritionist.  AW gives you some food for thought here on protein.

Training To Be Your Best: September 23rd-29th

We've made it through the first third of the season, congrats.  This week will be a "down" week, or a week with a little less excitement in order to allow the body to recover a bit for the upcoming stretch of meets.  It's okay if you have an invitational this weekend as the main part of the recovery will come from the easier workload this week.

Monday- 30-35 minutes of Ins and Outs, 8x strides, Strength Workout A
Tuesday- 35-45 minutes easy
Wednesday- 35-45 minutes easy, Strength Workout B
Thursday- 20 minute tempo
Friday- 25-35 minutes easy, 8x strides
Saturday- Invitational Race or Off
Sunday- Off or 35-45 minutes easy

Recovery is a vital part of a successful, long-term training program.

Legend:
Warm Up- A few minutes jogging, dynamic stretching, a few strides
Easy- A pace you can handle and have a conversation at the same time. Relaxed.
Tempo Run- A distance run at a pace of 5k race pace plus 30 seconds per mile.
Ins and Outs- Striding the straights and joggins the turns on the track
Strides- Not a sprint! Simply a short pickup of 50-100 meters at around 1-2 mile race pace. Full recovery.
Progression Run- Training done at progressive pace that increases throughout the run. Begin at an easy pace and finish at 5k race effort or so for the last few minutes.
Fartlek- A run of varied pace for varied time which can be anywhere from an easy jog to hard sprinting.
Hills- Not all out sprints, good paced effort around 5k race effort. Can be anywhere between 100-400 meters long.
Workout A- 10-30x pushups, 10-30x prisoner squats, 10-30x lunges, 10-30x crunches, 30-60 seconds of planks on each side and the middle, and 30-60 seconds of Australian crawl.
Workout B- 20-40x step ups, 5-20x tricep pushups, 30-60 seconds of bridging, 10-20x dips, 30-60 seconds of pedestal, and 30-60 seconds of scissor kicks.

Does Cross Country Ruin Soccer Explosiveness?

Recently, perusing my favorite forums filled with trolls and half-truths, I found a wonderful thread on soccer and cross country running.  It was a great look into the psychology of coaching as well as the dynamics of cross-sport training benefits and hindrances.  The premise we will explore today is the proposed question, "does cross country ruin soccer explosiveness?" which is actually quite a complicated matter and cannot be summed in a terse response.  Athletic training is not a continuum, it is a matrix, and therefore one position in the training matrix does not discount the possibility of having attributes for other variables.  Correlation does not imply causation (i.e. cross country does not get athletes slower), and the statement made by the soccer coach described in the forum post was mainly made on either bad information or ignorance.  In the simplest terms, his statement is absurd, and for many reasons.

First I want to consider the logic of the statement before I actually move onto a physical body of evidence.  Cross country is an inanimate object, simply an idea.  An idea can't have any physical bearing, it needs people to engage the idea like athletes participating in the sport and the coach preparing a schedule of training to maximize the productive output.  The reason I broke it down like this is because, by this coaches logic, I can easily make the argument that soccer causes ACL injuries, and especially in women, which is a huge problem in the sport.  This is obviously not true.  The physical and dynamic nature of soccer lends itself for the athletes to have a high incident rate of ACL tears, but by no means can be said to have caused the problems.  

Another issue is that many soccer coaches, especially at the club level, want to focus more on actually playing the game rather than developing fundamentals and athletic ability.  Similar issues happen with club basketball and nearly all levels of youth baseball where there is a higher focus on playing games rather than practicing.  I've said before that one reason why the NBA is simply miserable to watch now is that many athletes are making it to the highest level based on stature and physical prowess, but the sport is barely worth watching during the regular season due to bad coaching and bad player development.  This stems from the club basketball culture where athletes can play up to 60 games in a three month summer period.  Including travel time, is there any room left for actually working on skills? The learn-as-you-go approach is basically an excuse for lazy coaches who really don't want to hold practices.  I mean, you can make a lot of money from hosting tournaments and making parents pay ridiculous travel expenses for your team, right?  Why be bothered with something as non-lucrative as practice?  But don't worry, I'm not going to hang out the other sports to dry without drilling my own.

One reason why there is a stigma that cross country makes athletes slower is because there are A LOT of bad coaches out there, perpetuating that reputation.  There is nothing as damaging to an athletes dynamism like doing absolutely nothing explosive/athletic in training.  Here's looking at you LSD (long slow or "steady" distance) coaches.  Welcome to 2013, we're running sub 52s for the last lap of 1500s and 5000s on the regular.  Sure, cross country isn't the same as track but make no mistake, the 5k xc course is still only 3.1 miles.  Not only do I not see a need for you to run only slow, I mean "steady," distance in the off-seasons, I can't think of a single non-marathoner on the elite or sub-elite level who does this, so why would we do this for the developmental group?  When you choose to train only slow twitch muscle fibres, well guess what, you don't have a very dynamic athlete.  They haven't developed the neuromuscular pathways to be quick or agile, so of course the cross sport relationship will be strained. I also have no doubt, without having any body of evidence to link to you, that these types of runners who play soccer will actually have a comparable injury rate as sedentary players who only train for soccer during the season.  By this training strategy I have no doubt that there is a kernel of truth to what the coach was saying to his athletes.

Now I will make a crazy and bold statement: age group soccer players that run cross country for knowledgeable, scientifically based coaches will be better than their year round soccer counterparts.  I can imagine the soccer coaches out there are fuming right now.  Good.  And before I get a host of angry emails I want to explicate why runners in such a program would be better.  These athletes will have far fewer overuse injuries.  And furthermore year round runners will have less overuse injuries than nearly any other sport which requires athletes to participate year round.  Why is that? Because runners like mine who I train this way, and runners in programs similar in nature, train their athletes as if they were in a year long athletic development program which also focuses on building a giant aerobic base (or "house" as Canova calls it).  It's like a giant off season program that builds athletes just ready to explode in whatever sport they compete in next.  It's no coincidence that distance runners in my program are usually the fastest athlete in any other sport they play.  Last year I had three baserunners/outfielders for spring programs on my varsity cross country team.  Recently, I had one of my runners vertical jump almost 30 inches.  Last years 4x400m state championship relay we ran at the state meet was composed of three distance oriented runners who would often do workouts like 3x1000m to prep for the season, and could split 50s and 51s.  Tell me these types of athletes would not be prepared for the rigors of a game like soccer.  

Now, let's not only focus on this speed narrative.  Endurance is a challenge on the pitch as well.  It is noted that many forwards can run up to 10 kilos (6.2 miles) in a single match.  Given the 90 minutes or so that a soccer game totals this actually isn't that much for even a marginally trained athlete.  To be fair, a better term is not endurance, but speed-endurance, or the ability to maintain a relatively high level of quickness for an extended duration.  Chris Wondolowski is a good example of this.  He currently is a striker in the MLS, but in high school he was a 4:15 miler on his team at De La Salle in California.  Chris has a great amount of speed as well as endurance and because of his speed endurance he can be a threat to score on the international level.  

Wondo plays soccer but has a history of middle distance success.

The convergent point of speed endurance is speed reserve and aerobic power.  Speed reserve is the differential of the current pace an athlete is running and his maximal capability at the moment.  An example is when a 1500 runner runs 60 second pace per lap for the first 1100 meters and then finishes the last lap in 50-52 seconds.  They weren't nearly at their maximal ability level for the first three-fourths of the race.  But this rapid acceleration during the "kick" phase of a run can only be accomplished in tandem with an athlete who has strong aerobic power.  Usain Bolt can ran a 400 faster than anyone who lines up to run a 1500 at the World Championships but is built solely for speed, not aerobic effort and therefore would be worthless in the last lap of a 1500 because he would most likely not even be running anymore much less able to flush the metabolic waste of high lactate-oriented running that is acquired with middle distance training. 

Now why a paragraph about solely running on an article about soccer?  Because it illustrates the point that soccer takes place over an extended period of time and requires speed reserve and aerobic power as well.  Soccer is more like middle distance running than marathoning.  You aren't going to run that 10k during a match at 12 minute pace the whole time.  You are most likely going to have periods of walking, then some jogging, then an intense burst of speed in perpetual rotation.  And what does being able to kick into the last lap have to do with play soccer? Well, of course it isn't the exact same thing, but ability to accelerate into fast sprint consistently in the later half of a soccer match has a lot to do with the bodies success in aerobic and lactate spheres.  A poorly trained athlete will be in dire straits in the second half of a match and will not be able to compete with the productive output that a well trained athlete can maintain deep into a competition. That speed reserve is the ability to go to the well and sprint at near maximal efforts when the other team cannot match the intensity.

From a scientific standpoint, the ability to reduce metabolic waste such as excess hydrogen ions is trained through extended bouts of at least moderate activity (hey, distance running does that a bit).  A well trained runner has a keen ability to be efficient while competing and engaging the anaerobic lactate system. And understand that the lactate system will definitely be in play for the strikers because the phosphocreatine system burns up quickly, and furthermore the athletes will also be running too quick to solely function in the aerobic system.  Developing the lactate system for endurance is crucial for soccer and since there is a speed demand in the sport, you better believe developing speed reserve is going to help performance in the later stages of the game when all the Usain Bolts are huffing and puffing.  

The only thing a soccer coach can hang onto now that I have shown that cross country running does not impair soccer prowess is that time spent away from soccer may hinder skill acquisition for the sport.  I would argue that American football is just as skillful, at least for the "skill" positions, and these athletes are mainly found on the basketball courts and tracks around the country in the winters and springs each year.  It doesn't seem to hurt them too much and by all accords football on every level is becoming more competitive.  And lastly, cross country lasts 3 months. So that leaves 9 months for all the soccer madness (which is probably still too much time spent doing one sport at the age group level).   

Is Less Really More?

In economics there is a concept called the Law of Diminishing Returns.  It basically states that production and output are not constants and eventually you can only yield so much before production levels drop off or even reverse.  In athletics we have the same issue.  Your body is finite, which means limited, in the amount of training it can handle effectively and each athlete is different in the level they can handle as well.  I often see the over zealous coach who thinks 3-5 hours of practice a day for his athletes is the key to success and blames the athletes when they don't perform well.  It's irrational and irresponsible to attempt to practice that much day in and day out.  Sure, during a camp scenario or various, light dispersed training periods throughout the year you may have a larger chunk of training at one time, but usually that is followed up with a day or two of easy rest/recovery for maximal gains.  Here I have listed a few reasons why you need to train less, as oppose to more:

1) Extended training can raise the level of cortisol (the main hormone that responds to stress including training stress) in your body.  While a little bit of cortisol is a good thing, extended periods of cortisol in your body can lead to becoming unhealthy.  Your body is not designed to be able to handle stress without the recovery periods (remember Matveyev's model).  If you want your athletes to be sick, tired, and weak, train them for 3 hours a day and you'll be headed there in no time.  And one last thing.  Tell your kids that like to sleep 5 hours a night that they already have increased cortisol levels without the training, much less with it.

2) The chance of injury goes up with more training.  Even dismissing how cortisol contributes to injury, just think about how your body is made up of soft tissues.  They get damaged easily.  They repair pretty quickly, but it usually takes a few days to recovery from a very hard training bout.  So basically extended training means your body never fully recovers because it is always under a state of duress.  Usually for the high school athlete, 1-2 days a week off from hard practice can really go a long way, as well as 1-2 days of light training to facilitate recovery via blood flow stimulation.

Over training can affect an athletes ability to perform at a high level.

3) Lastly, and honestly the most obvious, is attention span of the athlete.  Unless your team is social in nature (which usually means being competitive is not the prime focus) it is hard to keep young athletes focused for more than 90 minute.  Excluding announcements or any talks we might give our athletes on the teams I coach, the practices rarely exceed 90 minutes save for one day a week (long workout days might be around 100-105 minutes), and that is from the first step of the warmup to the last step to the car home.  And practice is only that long because we make sure the body is fully warmed up before a workout and spend a long time on the cooldown and stretching after.  The main body of a workout usually lasts for far shorter than that time.  By the time practice is finishing you can already tell athletes are starting to lose focus, so how would you keep kids functioning during a 5  hour practice?

Take some time to reevaluate your training.  Rather than figuring out what to add, try and figure out what you can take out.  Efficiency is key in not just economics, but training as well.

The Talent of Toughness

So you read the article on how speed is necessary to come out on top on the track.  I heard the collective groan from distance runners around the country.  I feel your pain.  I had a whopping PR of 57 (relay split) for the 400 in high school.  Yeah, the World Champs or Olympics is a place few will ever get to.  Actually, well over a half a million kids run distance in high school each year with numbers growing, but every four years the US can only send around twenty distance athletes per gender to the Olympics.  I'm horrible at math, but I think that means only around one in over twelve thousand will actually make it, and that's if the US maxes out the amount of runners they can send.

No fear though.  Be strong. One of the beautiful things about this sport is that despite what we perceive as limitations on ability (or in other words, talent), very few athletes ever approach their full capacities, and furthermore, the ability to take a long term approach to the sport may have some big dividends down the road.  The mental toughness to test yourself in training and willingness to all-in for an extended period of time is important.  If an athlete takes into consideration his or her strengths in advance, one can achieve a high level of success later in life, even if it only a relative level of success.

Brian Sell of Hansons-Brooks was a wildcard in the 2008 Olympic Marathon Trials.

Exhibit A is Brian Sell, a distance fanboy favorite who has the awesome story of being a 10:08 2 miler in high school but finished his career as an Olympian.  Sell, who actually had a productive college career and ran 13:59 for 5k, still didn't have the type of speed usually considered necessary to compete in the Olympics.  As a reference, the two other runners who qualified for the Olympics that day, Ryan Hall and Dathan Ritzenhein, had both run in the 13:20s in college and were two of the "Big 3" in the class of '01.  Still, while most college runners in that time range were finishing their careers, Sell kept plugging away.  Our mustachioed hero joined the Hansons Distance Project, a notoriously high mileage training group out of Michigan.  Sell cranked out 160 to 170 miles a week during his build up to the Beijing Olympics while working part time at Home Depot.  The man didn't let anything get between him and that spot on Team USA.  There were many times Brian could have quit along the way, and he could kept his training conservative or "traditional", but he never did pursue those options.  Instead, he was one of the few that got to represent the red, white, and blue.  I think he qualifies as a tough son of a gun.

The Brian Sell story is still anomalous though, because he still had a special talent.  The ability to run 170 miles a week and not crumble like a cookie.  He was strong enough to deal with the training and still run on a high level, similar to our Canadian friend, Exhibit B: Olympian Cam Levins.  Cam sent the message boards into a frenzy after posting a 190 mile week.  I've only run 80 miles in a week before and that sucked (Cam is roughly 2.38 times tougher than me using a very scientific calculation). Guess he doesn't like to lose.  Or possibly he is insane.  Or maybe he is an insane man who also doesn't like to lose.  Cameron ran good times in high school and was a 4 flat 1500 runner in Canada, but honestly that would only place you around 500th on the list of prep runners in North America.  Cam is also anomalous because of the same talent Sell has, the ability to take his good (but very average speed compared to elites) and magnify his fitness through volume.  But you can find hundred of non-Olympic guys doing high mileage and not seeing that type of success, so why dwell on it?  Especially considered the average runner wouldn't be able to handle that volume in the first place.

The purpose is to show that guys who were limited (or at least were perceived to be limited) in one aspect of their fitness found a way to get it done by approaching training in a different manner.  If speed was a hindrance, to hell with giving up.  These types of athletes don't take no for an answer.  If they can't be Tirunesh Dibaba, they will grind out fast paces in the middle of races that drop the squeamish in a heartbeat.  It's a whole different approach to the "be a sprinter" mentality that dominates much of the track scene around the world.  Most Road and cross country races, as well as some of the longer track events are won by these types of runners.  Ones that have motors and fortitude that won't quit.  To the high school or college runner with good speed but not elite speed, why not just go for it in training? The odds that you will be an Olympian are minimal anyway so why save it?  At the least you will be be able to say you firmly tested your limitations.

There are plenty runners who are reading this right now and don't fall into the category of being Dibaba nor have the strength of a Sell or a Levins and I don't want to to exclude.  Rather, I want to focus on you because if the sprinters at the 1% and the tough guys are another small percentage, you guys are the vast majority.  If the ability to run blazing last quarter miles is not an asset, nor is having superhuman injury resistance, you still aren't a dandelion in the wind.  There is a sweet spot for you and you have to find it if you want to reach your personal peak.  I would venture to say that if you know your weakness lies in your foot speed, perhaps you may want to test the limits of the volume you can handle.  Conversely, if you injure easily when you hit a certain volume threshold, perhaps that is the point you should morph that volume into as high of quality as possible.  It's all a matter of thinking outside the box as well as being okay with testing your limits.  Not everyone will want to do that, but I want to give hope to the common guys and girls out there that if their heart is truly in running and they want to get as much out of their fitness as possible, think long term, build up to as high of a training threshold as you can handle, and see what you can do!  Be tough.

As an anecdote, a friend of mine who went to high school with me is currently on the "comeback" trail with marathoning.  He was a fine high school athlete, running 10 flat for the 3200 before leaving the sport for a decade.  He has never beat out his high school track times which he set over a dozen years ago, but now he is maxing out his mileage and aiming for the 100 mile+ range.  He broke 3 hours for his first marathon ever this past spring and can definitely push for a sub 2:40 before he finally hangs up his shoes.  Guess where most of the guys who were beating him in high school are?  Not running, that's for sure.  So who was the better runner in the end?  The 2:40 marathoner in his 30s or the 9:50 2 miler from high school?  Who came closer to reaching their "peak" fitness?  Also, who was more "talented?"

There are half a million or more teenage distance runners in the country and such a small portion of them will compete for team USA that, essentially, you can take your time and focus on the long term approach.  A small select few will have what it takes to actually break through that barrier of "average" times and run in the world circuit, but for the vast majority it will be just a test of what you can be with a good base and some heart.  You'll probably never be a world beater, but maybe you could be the local guy who everyone looks for to win the Thanksgiving race.  And well, even that's pretty special.

Training To Be Your Best: August 26th-September 1st

Goals: The racing season starts within the next two weeks.  It will be important to begin to find your pacing for your three mile or 5k during workouts.  Last week we did a 5k time trial, so monitor your progress and use that time trial as a rough guideline of what to run effort-wise in your workouts.  It's also time to start adding in your strength work!  Read the article and I will also add the strength routines down at the bottom.

Monday- 35-45 minutes easy, Strength Workout A
Tuesday- 12x200 @ Mile Effort with 200m easy jog recovery
Wednesday- 35-40 minutes easy, Strength Workout B
Thursday- 20 minute tempo run
Friday- 10-12x Hill Runs with equal jog recovery. Stretch after!
Saturday- 35 minutes easy, 10x strides
Sunday- Labor Day Weekend!

Strength training will be another great component of the program.

Legend:

Easy- A pace you can handle and have a conversation at the same time. Relaxed.
Tempo Run- A distance run at a pace of 5k race pace plus 30 seconds per mile.
Strides- Not a sprint! Simply a short pickup of 50-100 meters at around 1-2 mile race pace. Full recovery.
Fartlek- A run of varied pace for varied time which can be anywhere from an easy jog to hard sprinting.
Hills- Not all out sprints, good paced effort around 5k race effort. Can be anywhere between 100-400 meters long.
Workout A-  10-30x pushups, 10-30x prisoner squats, 10-30x lunges, 10-30x crunches, 30-60 seconds of planks on each side and the middle, and 30-60 seconds of Australian crawl.
Workout B-  20-40x step ups, 5-20x tricep pushups, 30-60 seconds of bridging, 10-20x dips, 30-60 seconds of pedestal, and 30-60 seconds of scissor kicks.

Knowledge is Power- August 9th

So continuing with our weekly series of the best articles that you need to read, here ya go!  Also, if you have any articles you think should be posted on here, feel free to submit them. Email me at vpprotraining@gmail.com.

Meet Day Protocol by Scott Christensen- Why it matters:  Reaching your potential is in a large way influenced by what you do you to prepare, mentally and physically.  Knowing what to do with your body the day of the competition is pretty much the core of sports performance.

World Championships Predictions by Athletics Weekly- Why it matters:  The World Championships happen the year before and the year after the Olympics.  It's the height of non-Olympic track and nearly as important in the track world.

Interview with Malcolm Gladwell by Runners World- Why it matters: Malcolm Gladwell is the writer of Outliers, a book which puts for the notion that practice is what separates talent.  He is a former Canadian champion runner and is one of the brightest minds in the sport.

New Doping Punishments in 2015 by IAAF-  Why it matters:  Track and Field is the purest sport still left on the earth and it has no home for cheaters and dopers.  The new 4 year ban will be a deterrent for athletes to dope, plus it will keep dopers away from the sport longer.

Iron Deficiency by Carl Valle-  Why it matters:  Iron deficiency is a major problem in sports, especially for women distance runners.  Stagnation and chronic fatigue are two attributes of iron deficiency.  In order to combat this, we need to monitor our eating!

Building the Perfect Athlete

The longer I coach in track in field the more I have respect for the amazing feats that not only my athletes achieve, but also the athletes world wide.  I've worked with distance runners, sprinters, jumpers, and throwers and have had some success with all.  Each group presents certain challenges that make coaching entertaining (as well as mentally draining).  Part of coaching is more or less trying to create a "perfect" athlete for your sport, but what does that really mean?

A few years ago I was having a conversation with a roommate about NFL players vs. world class runners like Haile Gebreselassie and Kenenisa Bekele.  His contention was that the runners were better because they had literally both pushed the limits of humanity by setting world records (by the same token this also included power lifters and other athletes who only focus on one dimension of their athleticism) and mine was that it was the NFL players because their overall athleticism superseded that of those who excelled in simply one event.  But either way it got me to thinking, who really is the best athlete, and does a perfect athlete even exist?

The answer is obviously no, by virtue of definition no athlete could ever be perfect because usually a person has to give a little in one arena to gain some in another (i.e. a soccer player has no need to put on bulk mass and upper body strength because the goal is to be quick and agile).  But if you could build a near-perfect athlete, where would you start and what would you look for?

This athlete would need to be explosive, no doubt, with quick reaction time and unrelenting speed.  A good strong frame (with necessary height) to go along with this speed would create a dynamo of power.  Agility would need to be an obvious prerequisite as many sports deal with shifty moves that can separate the contenders from the pretenders.  You would also need the endurance to outrun your competition over and over again.  This deadly combination of all things athletic would constitute the top performing human in the world.

You won't find many guys like this, mainly because top level athletes only train for their specific sports and focus on the requirements that allow them success within the sport.  But if I had to guess what this athlete would look like, I think the starting point would be Ashton Eaton.  You won't find many people who can run a 10.2 and a 4:30 mile or throw the shot put 50 feet and pole vault 17 feet.  Certainly I think guys who could be like Eaton exist within other sports.  The NFL, MLB, and NBA surely has a few.  Although none of those leagues promote the full development of a "perfect" athlete (and mainly because they don't have to).

Ashton Eaton is one of the world greatest athletes.

So how would one train to emulate the "perfect" training plan?  To physically develop themselves in a manner that exemplifies the furthest development of as many attributes as possible.  This means that the guys who only lift upper body won't qualify, nor the runners who slog miles without as much as a push-up along the way, nor could the body builders who fail to actually develop any athleticism in the gym.

To truly train to be an unconquerable stotan you must be able to lift heavy weights, sprint with ease, throw powerfully, and traverse sizeable mileage on foot with efficiency.  Is that easy?  Well of course it isn't easy.  But it isn't meant to be.  I mean, we are talking about near perfection right now.

Finally, let's come back to reality for a bit.  So not many are going to become a member of the 300 anytime soon, but there is a lesson to be had here.  Pursuit of physical and athletic excellence must be broad in scope and well planned.  You need to think about your personal limitations and how to challenge them.  Embrace parts of training you had never desired to venture before.  Quit being a one-dimensional athlete and start being a little more "perfect."

Knowledge is Power- August 2nd

As promised I am giving you some reads for the week/weekend.  These are articles I find throughout the week that I find very interesting or I think is great information for coaches and athletes to know about.  Hope you enjoy!

Uk Reuters article on David Rudisha- Why it matterst: David is the only runner to ever run 1:40 in the 800.  His head coach has coached several Olympic champions.  This is some insight into what his camp does to train to be the best.

Marks Daily Apple article on Sleep- Why it matters: Sleep is very important to a regular person for a healthy lifestyle, so imagine what an athlete needs.  This article breaks down why you are kicking yourself in the face when you don't get your sleep.

USTFCCCA article on Online Coaching Certification-  Why it matters:  Coaching certifications can help a coach bring his understanding of the sport to a new level and now you can take the course from the comfort of your home.

NY Times review of the book Outliers- Why it matters: While the review doesn't discuss much about the theory that 10,000 hours of training is needed before someone can become phenomenal at a task, it does discuss in good detail that concept of "right place, right time" that we should consider when thinking of success.  Take a look into the book or the theories of Malcolm Gladwell to see how he believes one must be lucky, but also work for a large sum of hours on a task before true success can occur.  This book is older and the article was more a prelude into the next link.

Letsrun review of Sports Gene- Why it matters: While I haven't read the book yet (it just came out yesterday), this review is very plain and gets to the heart of why we should take interest in the book.  Talent comes in many ways (not simply the ways listed in the review or book) and we should look to strengths to help foster the best athletes.

National Running Day

So today, June 5th, is national running day.  This is a celebration of all the miles and miles an individual or a team puts in so that they will succeed on the course and the track during competition.  It is a celebration of health and fitness.  It is also, this year, a remembrance for those who were affected by the Boston attacks.

If you've taken time off after your track season and wanted to know when to start that fall base, or are looking for a reason to get the summer training kick started, this is your chance.  If you complain that you never have someone to run with, find a local run group like the ones at Louisiana Running Company or Varsity Sports, both in the New Orleans area, or think about getting with a summer AAU team if you are a high school aged athlete.

The main thing that we need to think about today, though, is why we run.  For some, it is feel good and add years to their lives.  For others it is about competing or helping build a team up and accomplish team goals in the summer and throughout the next year.  It's also about the lessons we learn about what our minds and our bodies can handle.  It's about breaking time barriers and mental barriers.  Whatever the reason is, keep it up!

I'm sure Bekele and Geb are getting their runs in today.