after reading that ^^ i no longer feel bad about "feeling like sh*t" and having horrible races.
this dude felt awful alot, had plenty of bad races, and then set records. he's one of the best milers of all time.
interesting how many 10k's he ran..
yup:
RE: Steve Scott's Complete Training Log 1981-1982 2/21/2004 2:03PM - in reply to trackhead
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This is great stuff. A few observations:
1. It's remarkable how often Scott notes that he felt "bad," "tired," or "like shit." If someone removed his racing performances from the log, you might think that the guy was really overtraining. (Obviously, he wasn't.) It reminds me of a quote from Brendan Foster that went something like: "World class distance runners wake up tired and go to bed very tired."
2. Considering that Scott focused on the 800m/1500m/mile distances, I am surprised at how little interval work he did. (Compare a typical Scott week to a typical Coe week or a typical Aouita week.) It looks like Scott would normally perform a weekly, low-volume, high-intensity interval session. There would be at least one other day that included strides or minor hill work, but most of his training consisted of moderate-to-fast paced distance runs of 5 to 15 miles.
3. He raced a lot. And he was competitive over a broad range, from 800 meters on the track to 10Ks on the road.
4. Based on this log, his training didn't seem to vary much over the course of a year. His volume would go down a bit (and the intensity of the track sessions would be turned up a notch) during the prime competition season, but Scott's winter and summer training varies much less than it did for some of his contemporaries (again, the contrast to Coe comes to mind).
-Brent
A few comments:
1) Morning runs. One of the things you'll hear over and over again at Letsrun is young runners looking for justification NOT to run twice a day. You won't find it here.
2) Tempo runs. If you read Scott's log, like most runners in the day, you won' find the word "tempo" anywhere. "Tempe" maybe, but not "tempo". Why? Because Scott was doing them right. You see tempo runs everywhere, most often, "hard runs" or "last half (5miles) hard." If your tempo run is an end-all, needing rest days before and after, you've done them too hard. I don't give a damn what your VDOT table says.
3) Hills. "Deeee Heeeeel!" "What hill?" "Any heeeeelll!" The one thing that most runners of the day did consistantly was hills. Scott ran hills year-round. Went he wasn't doing repeats he was doing long runs on them. Ya think there might be a link?
4) Just think how good Scott would have been with a HRM and GPS device and some freakin duct tape on his nose?
60s, 80s, 100s, 120s @ goal 400m speed to improve 400m speed/ability via recruiting FT fibres and improving nervous response.
A few other things to take away from Scott's log:
1. Variable mileage. You train to race. Scott got that. Pumped his mileage when appropriate (looks like he preferred mid-90's for his base) and backed off.
2. To train and race at that level, you feel like crap most of the time. Get used to it. Scott did. BUT. . .he also was in tune enough with his body to be able differentiate between the normal feeling like crap and the kind of feeling like crap that signals you need a day off. The athelete is the best instrument to measure that.
3. Not obsessive about his training; a day off didn't bother him. Know why? He understood the purpose of training wasn't to train. It was to race.
4. He understood the mile was an endurance event.
5. He understood you run faster than race pace once in a while.
If you talk to him he will say that the problem with American runners today is that they don't run enough in their youth. True, he never did more than 40 or 50mpw in high school, but he did a lot of catching up in college.
The HSers around him doing higher volume and then disappearing were probably not progressively trained.
Here is something worth noting.
The fastest American miler ever (Steve Scott) didn't find it necessary to do speed training almost every day of the week.
The fastest miler on the planet (Hicham El Gherouj) doesn't find it necessary to do speed training almost every day of the week. Anyway, not if you go by his competitive season training examples that can be found on the internet. He alternated speed/pace days with overdistance days.
Therefore, it seems as if it isn't necessary to do speed training almost every day of the week as Coe and Ovett used to do when they got close to or were in their racing season.
nice:
Trackhead, obviously you have some personal contact with Scott, so I can't really dispute what you have to say. However, it's interesting to note that in "Steve Scott- The Miler", Scott writes the following:
"Back then, California high schools turned out droves of great distancemen, but few of them continued their success in college; most kids were burnt out from excessive running before they could possibly reach their potential. In high school, they trained upwards of 15 miles a day, wringing every ounce of strength from their young legs. Coaches, seduced by the high milegae that was given credence by professional marathon runners, either didn't know any better or didn't care.
I doubt I ever ran more than 40 miles a week at Upland. Loney knew what was right and did not want to push his runners to their breaking points. I trace my longevity in this sport to not being a teenage phenom on the fast track from the get-go."
I questioned him on that exact quote and he clarified it to me as, "just don't overdo it on anything." Intensity, volume, whatever. If a high schooler does too much volume to quickly, burnout is distinct possibility. The same can be said with intensity.
He's not saying "kids should run x amount of miles per week in HS" because everyone's starting from a different place. It doesn't make sense to have a runner who has never run before start putting in 4,000 mile years. I think the key here is "progressive volume" -- start wherever you start but work on (gradually) increasing that volume.
Especially with Steve, he didn't start running cross country until his junior year (he had been swayed from baseball as a sophomore, and comitted as a runner after watching Dave Wottle win the 800m in '72). And furthermore, even at 40mpw, Steve (as most HSers in his day) was not sitting at home on the computer or watching cable or playing video games. He was out running around, being active, which in its own way, is aerobic activity too. Modern American youngsters have many more non-physical distractions.
