First, I’ll credit my college coach, Rob Wood, with helping me come up with this workout. Before my first year on my own at Portland State I really did not want to start off the year with a time trial. I felt like there may not be as much to learn from a time trial as there would be with an interval workout designed to show me some aerobic efforts, and perhaps a little drop in pace toward the end to see who had some pop (either because they were blessed with fast twitch or because they could drop it from strength).

By the second year I decided upon 5x5x400m on 100s go’s for men and 4x5x400m on 120s go’s for women. The rest between sets is one more cycle on the watch (so 100s for men, 120s for women). On a 4:1 work ratio, the guys run about 80s and girls around 96s. So I figured this would give me an idea how guys could handle 26:40 8k pace and girls 20:00 5k pace. In XC both the guys and girls run about 23-27min races so I wanted the workouts to be “equal” from the time spent running standpoint. So, 80s x 25 = 100s x 20 … about 33min of hard running for both.

I don’t let them use watches, I just expect them to get into a nice comfortable rhythm, and I countdown their rest (15s, 10s, 5-4-3-2-1) for them. So, it’s a great workout, also, for them to be able to learn about their bodies and how they feel. Essentially as soon as they finish they just loop around and get ready to go again. If somebody is going slower, they either have less rest, or in extreme cases may have to run a couple continuous laps.

The reason I really like this workout is because it gives me some idea of their aerobic ability to recover on short rest, can give me an idea of their tempo pace (based on the consistency they show over a 4-5M long workout of work), and it can give me an idea of what kind of strength they have and/or ability to run fast while fatigued. If they don’t start naturally picking it up themselves in the next to last set, I prompt them that all I expect is to at least maintain what they’ve done, but feel free to drop the pace as their body feels. MD kids tend to like this kind of workout in the fall because a 5M tempo would be tough/impossible/unenjoyable for them, but having it broken into 400’s seems much more to their liking (though they do groan about 25!!!x400m initially). I also really like this workout because of all the ‘short breaks’ give you an opportunity to adjust the workout as you’re going. For example, if a kid is really struggling and has to do a couple continuous, I might suggest they do #1-2/4-5 in a set, or even #1/3/5 in a set to see if they just needed a little extra recovery, or if they’re still struggling you can just stop it.

Anyway… managing the workout with 40 athletes was something I was concerned about. But I ended up having the guys and girls finish on separate lines about 30m apart. (I generally start the guys/girls on opposite sides of the track, but we had to have water in one place at this location.) For the guys, I told them to split themselves into two groups. Since they kinda strung out during each rep anyway, a group of 10-15 was very easily manageable. I had my watch on 1:40 countdown, and so I would start group 1 when it beeped, and group 2 when my watch hit 1:00. Worked out well. My assistant, Jacquelyne Chantry, ran the timer on the girls workout.

I don’t know the times as well with the girls, but the top girl seemed to be coming in around 95-100s for most of hers. There were probably 2-3 other girls who seemed to be able to handle all of them ‘ok,’ probably in the 100-105 range. The guys had a couple run 78-80 consistently, and finished with a 68 or so on their last one. There were a handful of guys who were in the 80-85 range for basically all of them, and those guys had their last few under 80, so they were still able to pick it up at the end.

The awesome thing about this workout was the transformation that occurred between the first time they saw it on the schedule and when they completed it. At first they were mostly highly anxious about seeing a big scary number like 25x400m. But when I broke it down for them in our first meeting that “if you slow down, at its worst this workout becomes 4x2k at 8:00 pace for girls and 5x2k at 6:40 pace for guys” they started thinking it was a bit more manageable. And upon completing the workout (15 boys did all 25, and probably around 17 reps completed for most the girls), when I asked them how many accomplished something they didn’t think they could do, a ton of people raised their hands. Even one of the freshman girls who did 17 said “Well, the pace wasn’t as fast as I was hoping for on a few of them”… then I asked her how she felt about completing 17 400’s and she realized that she had probably never done more than 12 and did them with longer break… so while ultimately this is more just a broken-up tempo workout, the sense of accomplishment of doing that big of a number and a large volume workout like this gave her a good feeling to leave the day.

If you wanna bore yourself with watching the entire workout, it’s on video here…

http://www.runnerspace.com/gprofile.php?mgroup_id=28463&do=videos&video_id=52980