A special two for one post here today for my committed readers (and by committed I mean both faithful and hospitalized).
Bar Raising
How much is enough? Or more importantly, how much is too much? That's always the difficult question with volume. Asking the kids how they're feeling isn't much of a good indicator - the motivated ones always say "I'm fine. Can I do more?" and the slackers say after the first repetition "My leg just fell off, can I be done?". When I was in high school I commonly remember doing 16 (and by my junior and senior year 20) x 400ms for workouts. When I came to BHS as an assistant, our first couple years the athletes could barely make it through 8 x 400m. Sure the rest may have been a bit shorter, perhaps the repetitions a little faster, but I never left the workouts feeling plussed. I chalked it up to "Hippie kids are weak". Then when I became the head distance coach, I started raising the expectation. 8 became the minimum, strong freshmen were doing 10, upperclassmen 10-12. Because of the ice Monday, today's workout (Wednesday) became the one workout of the week, so we upper the expectation even more. 16 for many of the strong juniors and seniors, at least 10 for everybody else. Know what? They rose to it! Sure, I did an adequate job of scaring them, "Start these out on the slower end of your range, then get faster through the workout if you feel good. If you don't, by the end your legs will fall off, your head will explode, and tuberculosis will spew forth from all your pores." Doing this, nearly all of them felt good and started running faster and faster by the end. Thus not only did they do a ton, but they all left the workout feeling like they'd just set a new record on Whac-a-Mole. We'll see how tired/ sore everyone is tomorrow though...
Entry Changing
"I only am willing to race the 1600." - says 12 athletes (when I've only got 3- 6 spots available). "I have to work. I would have needed to request off one month ago to have gotten it off." (when the meet schedule has been posted for the last 3 months). "I care more about running race <x>, than I do in qualifying for State in race <y>." or "I realize you made initial entries on Monday, then revisions on Tuesday, but even though it's Thursday I just remembered, I'm taking the SAT on Saturday."
I heard all of these things this week (ok, maybe not the last one; but I'm guessing I'll hear it today at practice), and boy is it frustrating. It's basically like being an engineer working on optimization problems, but each time you get a solution, the client adds a new constraint. All your hard work down the drain. It's more than that though. It's that we are part of the system we're optimizing. Thus the solutions that get thrown out have an EFFECT on us.
Example:
Monday night
Johnny's Mom: What and when are you racing on Saturday Johnny?
Johnny: 3200m in the late afternoon
Johnny's Mom: Ok, great, your sister's soccer game is at 9:00am on Saturday so I can get both of you to your activities.
Friday night
Johnny: Oh, by the way, I'm racing the 4x800m now. It's at 9:00am. There's no bus to the meet. Also, I don't know any of the other kids phone numbers to arrange a ride.
Johnny's Mom: Suck...
Then there are the other difficulties when my goals (optimization constraints) are not my athletes. Like when I want to set up a relay to win, but one athlete only wants to do open events. Or if I want to get every athlete into at least one event, but my faster athletes want to be in many races. My athletes (and with increasing frequency, their parents) don't understand how we're all connected. That each decision made for an athlete ripples through the rest of the team. But I guess I get paid the big bucks to see the Forest while they get "paid" to see one tree.
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