The Weekly Coaching Clinic: This week's featured coach - Ryan Gallagher

Goal-Oriented Training – Ryan Gallagher, Brother Martin High School

As coaches and athletes, we always hear of new approaches, different perspectives, and cutting-edge modalities in training. While we constantly discover fresh ways to implement training, one aspect that ceases to change is the value of a consistent effort. Regardless of one’s personal philosophy toward training – which has no doubt been crafted through experience, trial and error, and – the foundation of every training philosophy, whether it is based in speed, strength, or mileage, rests on the idea of consistent effort. How I implement training varies year to year based on the strengths and weaknesses of the particular team I have on hand. What does not change for our program is the philosophy to which we subscribe: Every Day Effort = Every Day Success.

Regardless of the season (cross country or track & field), or which point of the season (pre-competitive, competitive, championship) or specific workout (recovery run, fartlek, tempo, interval, rep), our primary goal always involves communicating with our athletes and presenting them with clear objectives for the plan of that particular day’s work. What we do at practice is no different than what we do in the classroom – teach the team to implement skills, and also tell them how the skills they practice today will benefit them when they are asked to apply what they have learned in races. As coaches, we need to know why we want our athletes to undertake a specific bout of work. In turn, we then need to tell our athletes why they are doing what we have asked of them.  

When I tell the athletes in our program why I want them to do a workout and how that specific workout will pay dividends for them in future races, I have found that they are focused on the specific task, they have a clear goal in mind, and they are confident that they can achieve the task. I believe it is critical to create practices that focus on the specific needs of the team. With a general idea in mind of what we want to accomplish in a given week, we use our team’s recent race results and performances as a guide to constructing exactly what our workouts will look like. For example, if our team currently struggles with the latter part of a race, we can create practice sessions that focus on working on strength over the latter part of the practice session.  The athletes begin the workout focused on the goal in mind and end the workout confident in their abilities. With this philosophy in mind, the specific workout becomes secondary to the race-specific goal. In other words, the race-specific focus can be implemented regardless of the workout. Tempos , fartleks, interval sessions , repetitions , or even continuous recovery runs can all be tailored to target the specific needs of a team or individual. As a practical example, I offer a session, along with the race-specific goal, that our program completed earlier this week:

Following our first two meets, we noticed that the majority of the team struggled in the latter stages of the races, particularly the final half mile to mile. So, I told our team Monday that our focus over the next two weeks would be on strength and toughness over the second half of races. Thus, each hard workout we do over the next fourteen days will focus on this weakness in some form. Based on what we have done up to this point in the season (taking into account our summer and early season training), we had already planned one of our workouts as a tempo run this week. Considering our recent performances, we tweaked our tempo run to reflect our newfound focus on strength in the later stage of a race. So our pre-planned, even-paced four mile tempo looked like this in practice:

1 x 1 mile @ Recovery Pace minus 60 seconds w/ :60 recovery

2 x 1 mile @ Tempo Pace (race pace minus 20-30 seconds) w/ :60 recovery

1 x 1 mile @ Current Race Pace. 

I decided during the workout to give the team 90 seconds recovery leading into the race pace mile because the workout was fairly tough, and I wanted to make sure they nailed that last mile at race pace or even better in an effort to reinforce to them that they can run fast when tired towards the end of a race – in this case, even after having run three miles at a fairly challenging pace.  

The workout is actually a hybrid of legendary coach Joe Vigil’s fulcrum runs that he details in his book, Road to the Top. While our program’s philosophy differs in certain respects from someone like Vigil’s, we can still tailor his ideas to fit what I want to accomplish. This is one aspect of coaching cross country in which I find a lot of enjoyment – stealing the great ideas of other coaches and implementing them with my team.

Organized, well-though planning is essential to any team’s success. While I know the type of work I want accomplished ahead of time, I allow recent performances to dictate how we “practice the race.” Sometimes I find myself banging my head against the wall searching for the secret that will get our program over the hump. Should we tempo today or fartlek? Should we go easy or should we hit some intervals? Should we run even pace or vary the pace? In the end, the secret lies in consistency over time with a clear objective in mind. Every day effort = every day success.