How To Win National Titles

El CabaIIo

I meant to post this ages ago but forgot. Some dude over on letsrun strava stalked the men and women's NAU team and compiled every day of training for 15 months into a spreadsheet. For anyone who doesn't know who NAU are, They are currently going through a historically dominant period of American College running. They've won the last 2 National XC team titles and look set to take a third in a row next month and last year, managed to place 3 runners in the top 10 in the Country all with a team that was made up of what would be called mediocre highschool recruits. They've been on the team podium 7 of the last 10 years and now hold the record for the longest ever period of being ranked number 1 in the Country. They are now arguably the greatest team in the history of American Collegiate running which means they have to be doing something right to develop a whole team of good but not great runners into National champs.

Anyway, here's the spreadsheet with 15 months of training included.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1x4yANEFhJC4cF0gUx5IQ4ZTeChVgTe1AP0LUAYFMc8k/edit?usp=drivesdk

I think the number one observation here is just how simplistic their training is:

1)High Mileage
Early season base comprisining of 2-3 doubles a week with an Aerobic Tempo(2 hour race pace)(noted as Sub-T) which starts at 4 miles and builds alternates biweekly with a 1min on/1min off fartlek.
A weekly pure speed development session of 15-20second hill sprints

2)After summer base and entering race season at the start of September, those sub-T and fartlek workouts get replaced by more lactate Threshold workouts and the hill sprints get swapped out for more reps at 3/5k pace. Hills and Sub-T are completely dropped though and are sprinkled around just to keep in touch with those efforts. Volume is cut back to allow for higher intensity workouts.

3)The last 6 weeks which has a lot of racing, Threshold work is cut down and light sessions of short repeats are done to prime speed and turnover of race pace once a week. Volume is cut back even more to allow for racing.

Basically structure is:

10 weeks of base which focuses on aerobic development and pure sprintwork
6 weeks of LT/Vo2max development
6 weeks of sharpening and racing.

A few interesting notes:

LT runs are never longer than 25 minutes
Sub-T runs at close to marathon pace do not exceed 50 minutes

Anyone else got any thoughts?

Murph_D

NAU is based in Flagstaff, which is at 7000 feet. Altitude possibly a factor, as well as the training regime?

Testosterscone

Outline is not to dissimilar to many collegiate programs to be honest if you look at the likes of what Wetmore has done at Colorado or Mick Byrne with Wisconsin and Iona previously.

I think there has been a big change in culture though. Flagstaff has become the premier altitude training camp in the US with many top athletes and groups gravitating towards this. There seems to be pretty open door policy with many of the elites for people to jump in and out of groups to train with and many elites giving special praise to NAU for allowing them the use of facilities and no doubt this good will is probably returned.

I think this is probably helping create a positive culture of seeing how the best not only train but live outside of training which is probably instilling good habits in impressionable young athletes.

SligoBrewer

Surely they're having 5 or 6 pints before every race?

El CabaIIo

Testosterscone wrote: »

Outline is not to dissimilar to many collegiate programs to be honest if you look at the likes of what Wetmore has done at Colorado or Mick Byrne with Wisconsin and Iona previously.

I think there has been a big change in culture though. Flagstaff has become the premier altitude training camp in the US with many top athletes and groups gravitating towards this. There seems to be pretty open door policy with many of the elites for people to jump in and out of groups to train with and many elites giving special praise to NAU for allowing them the use of facilities and no doubt this good will is probably returned.

I think this is probably helping create a positive culture of seeing how the best not only train but live outside of training which is probably instilling good habits in impressionable young athletes.

Wetmore and Byrne are two of the greatest college coaches in the history of the NCAA though. The beauty of the outline is in it's Simplicity and repeatability. The outline of Wetmore and Mike Smith(NAU coach) is similar because it's basic periodisation which any coach who is coaching at that level should have a grasp on. But that's where the similarity ends as Wetmore is a lydiard based coach who focuses heavily on high-end aerobic and Mike smith is a daniels based coach who has a much more polarised view of training.

If it's all a matter of culture and seeing how elites live, how was Mike Smith so successful at Georgetown where there is no elite presence before he moved to head coach at NAU? I just looked to see how many All-Americans he coached at Georgetown. In 4 years, he produced:

47 All-Americans
23 NCAA Championship qualifiers
2 Olympic Trials qualifiers

That is an incredible record in a such a short period of time. It could be argued that Eric Hines was the coach that turned NAU around but Smith has taken them to an extreme level of dominance along with his record at Georgetown means he is doing something special in the coaching world.

So maybe instead of having such a myopic view of single aspects of the system, maybe alot of us should look at what we can learn from it as a whole.