Then and now

When Phil and I started coaching together for our first full year in the fall of 1991, our cross country schedule that season kicked off with meets on six consecutive Saturdays. Six consecutive Saturdays! Heck, it might have even been seven weeks in a row, but I’m too lazy to look it up.

Anyway: Imagine that? By today’s modern coaching parameters, this sort of over-racing is nothing short of blasphemy.

Again, my memory might be a little fuzzy, but I recall that we worked pretty hard during the week, too. Generally, there would be a cruise interval or tempo type workout on Monday or Tuesday, mile repeats at Vanderbilt trail (or other interval-type efforts) on Wednesday, and racing on Saturday. That’s a mighty heavy workload for a relatively young and inexperienced team, right? In retrospect, the answer is probably yes.

Here’s the thing: I know it’s almost 20 years since that fall, but as I recall no one’s legs fell off. Our injury rate wasn’t terrible. And both men’s and women’s teams ran pretty well out at the Northeast Conference (NEC) Championships at Robert Morris near Pittsburgh at the end of October.

This long-ago schedule (which, in reality, does not seem that long ago to me; but that’s part of aging, I guess) comes to mind now, as the 2010 XC season embarks on a busy and ambitious racing slate over the next month and a half.

We have six meets over the next five weekends (on Oct. 16, the team splits to two meets on the same day); basically, we are racing the next five weekends and six of the next seven, counting MAACs. This busy schedule was the byproduct of our large roster; it will enable our men and women to get racing opportunities by splitting the squad or running partial squads (which still amounts to a full team by most standards) on most weeks.

On the men’s side, no one will race more than three times over the next five-week period, some will race less than that and no athlete will race on three consecutive weekends. On the women’s side, some ladies will race more, but most will race about three and maybe four of these events. Chuck believes that some women’s cross country runners benefit from more racing; I tend to agree. The men, with the longer racing distance, need to be a bit more cautious.

But again: In 1991, our men raced 8km every weekend, with little issue.

Back in the 1970s, during Coach Rich Stevens’ heyday, the men’s team (there was no women’s squad back then) raced upwards of 20 times (!) in a season. This included mid-week dual or tri meets and always had weekend invitationals. They did hard interval workouts, lots and lots of 400s on the Poughkeepsie High School track, the famous “skull and crossbones” hills, and long runs. Stevens’ 1970s-era teams were fantastic. Blog follower, loyal program supporter and former Marist XC captain from that era Marty McGowan can attest to all of this and more.

Let’s do a similar analysis of marathon training, OK? When I first started running marathons back in the early 1980s, standard operating procedure was to complete your last 20-mile training run on the Sunday before your goal race. That’s right: A long run of 20 miles just seven days before your goal race. That’s the way it was done. Modern marathon training programs and endurance sports coaches would scoff at such nonsense; most current training paradigms call for the last long run three or four weeks out, followed by a gradual and sometimes dramatic taper leading up to the Big Day.

Runners ran fast marathons on that old-school training; cross country runners from the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s that raced a lot, often raced well. Does that mean the Old School was the right way to do it? Are the scientific approaches and cautious racing philosophy of the New School the wrong way to do it? The answers are “No and No.” The answers are “Yes and Yes.” The answers are “Yes and No.” The answers are “No and Yes.”

My point: Things worked in the past that might not work now; things work now that just wouldn’t have been possible in the past. You live, coach and run in the moment. You learn from the past, you learn from the present, put it all together and hope for the best.

And so, for the next few weeks, we race. As a program, we race a lot. That might make us somewhat unusual for 2010, but we are also adjusting to 2010 thinking while racing a 1991-type schedule. We hope for the best, and we do our best, and see how it all turns out.