Managing the high-performance athlete

Something struck me recently about a session in Bob’s programme. Written down, it occupies a fairly ordinary line: five or six efforts of six minutes, with two minutes’ recovery.

For a collection of six-minute efforts, it carries quite a lot of meaning.

Bob takes confidence from this session. He has a clear sense of what the average pace tells him about his running. In his head, he can sustain something around two or three seconds per kilometre quicker in a 10km race. It gives him a reference he understands. He feels he knows where he is, rather than flying blind.

That matters to me when I’m putting his training together.

The session isn’t part of the regular rotation in this block. Tuesday has a double threshold day, with five four-minute efforts in the morning and twenty 400s in the afternoon. Friday has the longer tempo or VO₂ workout. Those sessions provide the recurring structure around which the rest of the week sits.

During a recovery week, we take out the double threshold and the second workout, and work hard once, on Wednesday. That’s where the six-minute efforts fit. We make room for them a couple of times during the build.

He also has two easy running days beforehand. He goes into it rested, which helps him relate the effort and pace to how he expects racing to feel. The circumstances are part of what makes the session useful to him.

There’s a practical coaching decision in all of that. I know this session gives Bob something he values, and I can accommodate it within the structure of the block.

There’s also a balance to manage.

Once a session means something to an athlete, its result can carry quite a bit of weight. A good one can leave them feeling very assured. A disappointing one can invite a fairly extensive reconsideration of their fitness, preparation and prospects, sometimes before they’ve finished cooling down.

We are never as bad or as good as any individual workout might suggest.

That applies to the sessions we deliberately use as reference points as much as it does to everything else.

If the pace wasn’t quite what we expected, did you work at the intensity we were after? If the answer is yes, good. You’ve done the work. Let the numbers go rather than carry them into the next session.

That applies throughout the programme. We see less of that variation in the six-minute efforts because the two easy days beforehand give us more consistent conditions. Elsewhere in the block, an occasional disappointing pace doesn’t need to become a problem to solve.

Equally, a very good session belongs in the context of everything around it. We can take confidence from it while remembering the weeks and months of work that made it possible.

That accumulated work is what we’re trying to bring to the start line. Individual sessions help us understand how it’s coming together.

I think this is one of the interesting parts of coaching an athlete at Bob’s level. The detail includes knowing what helps him trust his preparation, what he uses to judge himself, and when a result needs a little perspective.

There is room in a structured programme for that understanding. Knowing the athlete influences the decisions we make within it.

The six-minute efforts matter. So do the two easy days before them, their place in the block, and what Bob thinks they tell him afterwards.