Archives for cross country athlete

Assessing the Athletic Lifestyle of the Cross Country Athlete

More and more scientific studies on distance runners have shown that proper recovery facilitates faster physiological adaptation and enhances endurance-related performance. By ignoring recovery today, it all leads to tomorrow’s poor practice session and, eventually, poor recovery habits that are tough to break. It also reinforces attitudes that can lead to under-recovery injuries. However, by…

Aerobic Power Training

Documented training schemes designed to improve aerobic power velocitym (vVO2 max) in distance runners were first described by the Soviet Sports Institute in the 1970’s. Besides the Eastern Bloc countries, one of the athletics organizations to quickly pick up on the training concept was the British Milers Club in the early 1980’s. Frank Horwill and…

Aerobic Power Principles

Aerobic power is considered a good measure of aerobic fitness. Commonly known as VO2 max, it is useful for the running coach to determine what velocity is associated with present day aerobic power development in an athlete at that moment in time. Once the vVO2 max is determined it can be used to structure aerobic…

Aerobic Power Primer

All of the standard distance races including cross country are combined zone races. Combined zone means that energy needed for muscular contractions at race pace is derived from both the aerobic and anaerobic energy systems in combination. Improvement in both the capacity and efficiency of these independent energy systems, and how they work in tandem,…

Cross Country Workout Themes

One of the most important chores that a cross country coach does is to set the workout themes for the many daily sessions during the season.  The workouts must be compatible with the other workouts that are sequenced around each other, and themes must be appropriate for the time in the macrocycle in which they…