The topic of speed endurance is one that is of great interest to me. Not only because I am searching for the perfect way to train this quality in my athletes, but also because it is an area that I feel limited me in my own ambitions as a sprinter.
In general, UK coaches seem to have the mentality that “more is better”, and that sprinters need to have a large base of aerobic fitness in order to finish 100, 200 and 400 metre races strongly when the season comes about. Sessions including large amounts of 200, 300 and 400 metre runs seem to be commonplace, especially in October and November. I even know of at least 2 groups which contain world class sprinters where they will run 800 metre reps in portions of their yearly cycle.
A few years ago, I observed a set of circumstances that have influenced my own thoughts on speed endurance greatly. A particular athlete, who I know well, was struggling with the last part of his 100 metre races. He started well, was in contention at 60m, and then faded badly. As all athletes who have anything about them will do, he searched for the answer and in this case he decided to move coaches. He was told, “What’s wrong is you lack speed endurance, we need to work on your fitness.” They proceeded to start a training program that included lots of reps at 300, 250 and 150.
This athlete struggled with every session I saw him do, getting shown up by athletes who were vastly inferior to him in terms of talent. When the next season arrived, he expected alot (as I did for him at the time)! He had better endurance now so surely he would not fade at 60m. What actually happened was, he still faded badly and was now not able to get to 60m in the lead. This all lead to his worst season in a long time. What had happened? It didn’t make sense! Clearly his speed and power had been negatively affected, despite the fact he had also trained these qualities in the macrocycle.
This one instance lead me to totally change the way I trained my athletes for speed endurance, which up until that point had been similar to the old school British way of brutal 300 and 200 reps run multiple times. I thought about the term “speed endurance.” Speed........Endurance. Speed endured. The ability to be endure speed. Think about it! How can you train to be fast for an extended distance if the runs themselves are not fast? If you run a 250m rep for instance, is it fast? A time trial, maybe, yes! But do it twice, 3 times, how many are fast? Not many! You are training the wrong quality! Does a sprinter really need this ability to pull out 250 after 250 at 90% effort?
If there’s one thing I’ll take from Charles Poliquin who so far has been a huge influence on my coaching career, it his “Bang for your Buck” mentality. Is the exercise selection, distance selection or intensity really adding anything to the overall performance? Or is it just something we do without question because we always have? I feel these sub maximal sessions are unnecessary and add little to the end result, so guess what, they are no longer in my programs.
My feelings have been backed up by conversations with Dan Pfaff who stated to me that his 100m runners would rarely run more than 150m.
The late Charlie Francis is another well known coach who believed in working his athletes very intensely. Francis acknowledges that all qualities and the ability to train them are underpinned by an athlete’s aerobic capabilities. However, he believed that if an athlete had been trained to be aerobically efficient at a young age that this area needed little attention, perhaps a 4 to 6 week phase that included some of this training at the start of a macrocycle. Any more would negatively affect the important type 2a and 2b fibres. Therefore the majority of the work his athletes did was very fast in nature.
I also recently watched an interesting series of interviews on YouTube with Glen Mills and Usain Bolt. When Mills was asked what he attributed Bolt’s big improvement in 2008 to, he explained that they had analysed his 2007 world championship 200m silver medal race and decided that he was not finishing strongly enough. So the easy answer is obviously they worked on his endurance, plenty of over distance work to make him much stronger and fitter? Wrong! Mills decided that Bolt needed to work on his base speed in order to improve his finish in the 200m. He started training like a 100m runner. Well, the rest is history. He went on to produce what is arguably the best series of performances in an Olympic games. Bolt’s new ability to be super fast had meant he could endure the speeds necessary to finish the 200m in a world record time.
I’m not saying that I think there is no place whatsoever in the training of sprinters for sub maximal runs over 200 or 300 metres. They have some use. I just don’t believe that their high importance is well placed, as seems to be by many coaches who seem to be stuck for ideas when their athletes die with 40m to go.
Below are some examples of speed endurance sessions one of my sprinters rotates during the competition period, they are split into hard, medium and easy;
Session 1 (Hard)- 180m, 180m, 150m (10 mins between runs)
Session 2 (Medium)- 75m x 2 (2 mins recovery) x 2 (8 mins between sets)
Session 3 (Easy)- 150m @ 90% effort x 6 (4 mins recovery) (it is worth noting that this is more of a tempo type session and I would not class this as pure speed endurance, each of these sessions is completes once in every 9 track session cycle).
Also please note that I write all my athletes programmes individually so the speed endurance program for other athletes would look different due to differences in the physical makeup, technique and event requirements. |
