The Mid-Season Evaluation

Evaluation is always an important part to the success of a program.  Your team will miss out on opportunities to improve down the line if you don't learn to evaluate successes and mistakes each season.  This is true for any sport, not just cross country and track and field.  See what workouts worked, what motivation techniques got the kids excited, and what you might think would be a more efficient use of time.  Here is a short list of items to consider when evaluating the season:

1) Are you on the path to meet your goals?  Compared to where you want to be in a month, are you close to being in a position to reach them, or have you already reached some of your goals and need to establish new ones?

2) Is there a workout or day of the week where your team struggles to accomplish the necessary training?  Can you shift that day to another one in the week, or change how you implement a workout to make it more effective?

3) Is the team buying into the season plan or are you struggling with connecting the training and the vision of the team?  Is there a way to get the athletes to better understand the connection between their effort and their goals?

4) Have you received the support you were expecting or do you need to challenge your parents/coaches to make a bigger impact on the team?

These are all items that you can work on correcting within the course of a season, even if they are a bit difficult.  These are the "half-time" adjustments of a season and be important to getting back on track or staying the course.

Remember the SMART goals!

Giving Training Its Dues

If you have figured anything about me by now you have probably figured out that I am an old school, hard nosed coach that doesn't like to put up with too much rah rah.  I do enjoy a good joke and sarcasm is my favorite form of humor, but when it comes to training, I'm unrepentant about how serious I am.

One of the biggest problems facing the sport is coaches, athletes, and parents looking for quick fixes and immediate satisfaction.  One thing that I hope you are picking up by now is that there are no quick fixes.  The teams that win have gotten to their perch from years of building up.  The flash in the pan programs who try to crash train or use gimmicky training to reach the top only have success for a year or so then fade back to where they came.

Talent doesn't matter in high school, unless you are talking about the talent of toughness so teams that say they can't compete because they don't have the talent are mainly just looking for excuses.  Sure, a small school that only has a team of 15-20 will have a hard time beating out a school with 80-100 runners regularly because the bigger school will be much less affected by graduations and team members who "lose the passion" but in reality that small team can work its' butt off and take it the bigger team week in and week out if they train hard and smart.  All the small team is a group of at least seven runners every year who have the talent of toughness and they will be a force.

Now going hand in hand with that, it takes many months and years of training to reach your peak, so those who want to be state champions from the first year will probably be disappointed.  Every PR, even if only a second, is a victory.  Work up on the small goals first before you try to skip straight to the ending.  There will also be many plateaus during training where the athlete will be working hard but won't be improving and that is simply a natural part of training.  Most high school athletes are no where near their physical peak so eventually that plateau will be broken, but not if the athlete loses focus and wants to feel sorry for themselves.

If you want to succeed you need to suck it up and think long term.  There are too many kids and coaches who leave the sport early because they don't see success in just a short amount of time.  It's crazy. Keep your goals focused, keep working hard, and you'll be happy you did so when you are on the victory podium.

Envisioning Success

Before you read the next sentence I need you to stop, close your eyes, and think about what your goals are for the rest of the year.  You didn't cheat did you?  Okay, let's move on.  We've now got a little more than four and a half months till the year ends.  Are your goals SMART?  I've talked about goals before and you need to understand that I will continue to harp on them because they are essential to success.

Goal setting is a part of a process that, with mental and physical dedication, will eventually lead you to be in a better position than you were before you embarked on your personal quest.  In order to set more effective goals, check out the SMART protocol, and check on my goal setting post.  I want to move a little bit further along to a point where your goals are already set (like the ones you have for the rest of the year).

Between setting the goal and the end result there is the process of building the vehicle to get you to your destination.  Imagine that the goal is point A, the final result is point B.  There are many ways to get between the points, and equally as many ways to get off course.  One could ride a bike, or one could take a jet between the points.  Which do you think yields a quicker path?  Now obviously that is just an illustration and not truly how the process works, but you get the point.  You need to figure out the best course of action.  

Which path will you take?

So what can you do to make sure you are on the proper path?  Well, envision ahead of time the requirements for success, as well as potential obstacles you may have.  If I think ahead of time about issues that will certainly come up, already have an idea of how to deal with those issues in a timely manner.  If I know that fundraising for my team will be an issue, do I really want to wait till the team bank account is down to zero before I think of a fundraising event?  If I feel that at a certain part of the year my team gets stale in their training, do I really want to happen again without a well thought out response to the problem?

The ability to foresee what can inevitably derail you from the path to success should also be coupled with the ability to foresee what actions you can take to to ensure you reach your potential.  What strengths of yours will you take advantage of to see your goals achieved?  What positive aspects of yourself or your program do you know will be the deciding factor in your path to the top?  That is how you envision success.  Have goals, plan ahead, think positive, and work diligently to finish strong.

Quality vs Quantity: The Coaches Dilemma

I have talked about how you need to have a coaching philosophy before, and honestly sometimes you have to make a few mistakes to learn how you prefer your team and your training to be.  One problem I often talk to my friends about who also coach at the high school level is how to build a team from a numbers outlook.  It is the age old quality vs quantity debate, but it one worth considering.

There are a lot of holes to fill in track in field from a coaches standpoint.  You have up to twenty events, some of which require four athletes while all the others have two spots available.  Here in Louisiana, for outdoor track you have a total of 42 spots to fill.  Even with allowing athletes to double, triple, and for a select few, a quadruple, you run into an issue of how to stock and organize your team.  Sometimes you even may be sharing an athlete with another sport, or waiting on a few to finish up their other seasons.

First off, let me say this: as far as quality and quantity is concerned, no coach should ever simply look at a situation from a numbers standpoint and build up a program just for the sake of saying they have such and such amount of athletes on their team.  That being said, I want to address the reasonable approach to quality and quantity.

That daunting number of spots to fill for the district or league meet can cause a coach to reach out and try to acquire more athletes for his team, and this is understandable.  The more athletes on your team the better odds you have of being successful, it's a numbers game in that sense.  The quantity approach becomes an issue with respect to two issues (well, there certainly can be more but those would be more circumstantial to the individual program):

1) Not having enough resources to properly train the athletes.  If you don't have coaches willing to back you up, or at least volunteers to help with certain events, instead of having one well trained group of athletes for a set of similar events, you will have a whole bunch of athletes who are average because you didn't get to spend enough time with them.  If one coach is trying to train distance runners, hurdles, and javelin throwers on the same day, and all after school, something is going to fall through.  Time management should always be on the mind of the high school coach.  Consider this when you are building your team and your staff, even if that means looking for volunteers and parents.  If you have two coaches who have the same background, see if one would be willing to step outside his comfort zone and learn a new set of events to help the team.  Being a time crunched coach is never optimal, although there are certainly ways to still keep your sanity and have a decent team.

Another issue with resources is space for training.  Not every school has a track.  We don't at the school I coach at, and our sprinters, distance runners, and throwers all practice at separate places to accommodate their needs. Travelling to practice may be an issue with more athletes, so that needs to be factored in.

2) The other main issue is bringing on athletes who have the same vision, or goals, you do for your team.  If you are reaching out to students just to fill spots, and they come out with a different work ethic than what the team needs to accomplish the vision, you may be doing more harm than good.  The desire to build numbers can be great, but distractions at practice can ruin a workout, a training week, or even a season.  Make sure, as you build your numbers, you are not merely causing more work for yourself with no reward.

Quality does not have to be the opposite of quantity if the number of your athletes are all in on the same plan to achieve the team goals.  Furthermore, keeping kids involved in the sport helps keep it alive and well.

Organizing and building the quality of your program is of high importance for a track coach.

Mediocrity Is A Choice

About ten years ago I had made an acquaintance, a friend of mine's father, who would impart wisdom on us weekly when we met for coffee.  He was a successful businessman and was involved with the younger generation by offering them sales jobs right out of high school and college and sought to teach them about finances, responsibility, and decision making.  I distinctly remember one afternoon when we were discussing how to make a big decision in life, this particular instance was about taking a job that required moving to a new city.  The lesson can be applied to all major aspects of life though.

He offered us the advice that you couldn't be comfortable with a decision until you had gotten rid of all your alternatives, although he had used a more colorful description of how to eliminate the excess.  He told us that as long as you have other options you can never truly commit to a project, a job, or anything else in life that required a commitment.  If you always kept an escape plan, any time a situation became difficult you would opt to leave.  This, he described, is why people tended to be mediocre.  It is natural for people to abandon a project when it becomes trying, instead of sticking with it and enjoying the fruits of their labor down the road.  Greatness required a sense of urgency.  Having alternatives gave people a passiveness and a carelessness about their day to day lives.

I had a lot to think about after that talk, and now when I think about what he said and relate to it as a coach I understand even more.  In order to excel at a sport you have to eliminate the option of being mediocre at it.  That might sound counter-intuitive.  You simply can't decide to be above average, or can you?  I think about elite level high school talent that I have met who aren't doing half the training, or preparation, they could be doing to further themselves along as an athlete.  There are plenty of coaches around the county who do well because of the talent in their programs, not necessarily that they go above and beyond.

If there are some at the top who are seeing success off of average work ethic, that simply leads me to believe that the middle of the pack, and the back of the pack for that matter, are that far behind simply due to lack of effort.  If all work ethics were equal, talent alone would stratify elite and average and below average talent, but it isn't.  Therefore you would assume to see elite level talent in the mediocre groups more often due to bad work ethics, but even that isn't normally the case.  Simply, what this tells me is middle of the road talent, instead of working up to an elite work ethic, instead also have a middle of the road work ethic.

To sum up, I am saying being mediocre is a choice.  Just like what Malcolm Gladwell talked about in his book Outliers, deliberate practice and a refusal to succumb to the pressure to give up is what it takes to be truly elite, even amongst those with elite level talent. But the average person can climb vastly higher than they truly allow themselves in most situations.  There is, of course, one other important factor to success and that is the providence to be exposed to the necessary components at the correct time, but that will be explored in the next post.

Recovery Periods

If you are a coach who likes to train year round you ultimately come to a point where you consider how long you are going to give your kids off after each season.  You want to give the kids a mental break from the sport for a bit, but you also don't want to waste valuable time, especially if you have cross country in the fall.  There is no fast and easy answer though because every team is different and every team has to think about their goals and what it will take to meet them.

For cross country teams, I don't know a single program that doesn't start their summer workouts at least by June (I'm sure the states where the state meet is in June start a bit later than that though).  Some meet six days a week, some five, some only three but the main point is they are back to work within a month of when they finished the previous season.  One path I like to take is to give more shorter breaks throughout the year rather than two or three longer ones for the simple reason of staying in touch with the kids and making sure their grades are staying in order, etc.  Also these athletes are competing in four seasons between cross country, indoor, outdoor, and summer track so smaller breaks more often fits better into the training.

You also need to make sure your goals are aligned with your training philosophy.  If your goal is to win state and you wait till August to start training, you may be in for a rough year.  July may even be late for most state caliber teams.  But if your goal is simply a top ten finish at state, perhaps that isn't too late to start.

For sprinters who finish their summer track season at the beginning of August and don't play a fall sport, you need to consider if you compete in indoor track or outdoor only.  For indoor track you may want to be up and training in October or November while you can wait till January at the latest for outdoor track.

Goal Setting

This is the first of a couple blog posts that I am reposting from an old blog I had a couple years ago.  The material is still applicable and will help coaches and athletes alike. The first is on goal setting:

Goal setting is a simple concept that seems to escape everyone at some time or another. There are two main facets of a goal for training purposes. First, the obvious accomplishment that we are trying to achieve, but the other which is equally if not more important is maintaining focus during the lead up to the performance. The goal will help you remember what you are training for along the way and keep you motivated to continue to push harder. Without a goal you will find yourself without a clear focus, and possibly just plodding along with your workouts.

Now comes the part of determining what a good goal should be. If you are new to sport you probably shouldn’t set a goal of running a sub 4 minute mile or bench pressing 300 lbs. Often times, even for seasoned athletes, goals are set impossibly high and will only set them up for disappointment. By the same token, sometimes goals are set too soft and are easily broken well before the planned peak period. While this is not necessarily a problem, if you realize that a goal will be broken on the short-term, you should set up multiple goals that can be achieved in sequence to help keep you motivated and on track.

A good way to set a goal for a seasoned athlete is to look back on their training (I highly suggest training logs be kept for multiple reasons) and determine if they are willing to put in the amount of work required to achieve that same training stimulus plus more. If it seems plausible, then one could set a goal of perhaps a 3-10% performance gain from the last peak period. Remember, the goal should be difficult enough that you have to work hard to achieve it, but reasonable enough that you can do it within the given timeframe. For runners this may mean taking your 5 kilometer time from 17:30 to 16:55 or for a lifter to get their one repetition maximum up from 250 to 260 for the bench press. As long as the goal is something you know you can achieve it is a good goal. Now when it comes to older age groups, a perceived increased training stimulus may be to maintain the status quo of their training, or even attempt to decelerate the decline of the performance due to age.

A good way for a beginner athlete to set a goal is to complete an event, or reach a certain threshold in their training. This may be to finish a sprint triathlon or be able to do a certain amount of push ups. A good rule of thumb for beginners is to not use any preconceived notions of what you can or cannot accomplish. It is very easy to get discouraged by looking at the performances of athletes who have been training for years. Understand that you can achieve great results by maintaining consistency in your workouts and to keep reminding yourself of the goal you have set.

Goals will come and go. You will achieve some, and other times you won’t. This is where you must adapt and determine if you training program was too easy, too hard, etc. And if you get bored in one arena, try spicing up your training with new exercises you hadn’t used before and set goals for those as well. Happy training!