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thinking out loud about issues related to coaching...</h3>
Everyone comes to the state meet hoping their athletes are properly peaked. But are we searching for a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow?
Fourteen years of pages have flipped by on the calendar since I began coaching distance runners. Pretty much the entirety of those 14 years have been spent under the impression that the ideal we aspire toward as coaches is to produce a peak—a long moment of maximal physical capacity—as close to the state meet as possible.
If peaking is the right model for understanding how we are to train our runners, I have to confess that—despite all of our accumulated state championships—I’ve done a perfectly miserable job of timing our peaks.
As a rule, in the fall we have aimed for our peak at the state cross country championships. There were a couple of years with our girls teams where we aimed for Nike Cross Regionals, but this is far more the exception that the rule. Despite aiming our peaking period at the state meet, we have frequently run our best races three or four weeks later—and long past the period where a peak or a plateau is said to be able to extend—at Nike Cross Regionals.
In the spring, we have aimed for our peak at the state track and field championships, but I’ve long since run out of digits to count those runners who ran their best races in the weeks prior to state rather than at the state meet. Were there a post-season track meet we frequented, perhaps I’d find that some of those state “peaking” performances I thought we had weren’t really peaks at all.
I’ve spoken with numerous other coaches who’ve lamented the failed timing of their own attempts at peaking their athletes.
At some point, and after producing enough wrong answers, you begin to wonder if you’re even trying to answer the right question. Stay with me a while here as I attempt to explain the course of my thinking.
We’ve all seen the athlete—whether or our own team, someone else’s team, or both—who was pounding out great times in meets leading up to state, but who failed to produce according to expectations at the big show. And, barring an obvious injury or illness, the more or less universally accepted executive summary of that situation seems to be, “She peaked too soon.”
One of the mantras of peaking is that if you push the anaerobic end of training and racing too soon, you will produce an early physiological peak and the athlete in question will reach an optimal state of performance at an earlier-than-desired date. Mantra or no, where is the hard science to document this? And has anyone ever bothered to identify any, let alone all, of the confounding variables in this scenario?
To get directly to the point, is it conceivable that what we term “peaking too soon” might be more aptly described as “pushing the athlete off the cliff” of training and racing?
Clearly, some athletes arrive at the state meet less capable of running big times that they were two, three, or four weeks prior to state. So, let’s ask the tough question here: Is this more about miscalculated timing of the athletes’ peak or more about pushing too hard too often during the season so that the athlete arrives at the state meet in a compromised condition? At some level, it doesn’t matter if the compromised condition is mental or physical; either can be detrimental to an athlete’s performance. And, one compromised condition can lead quickly to another.
If you ask a coach to draw a diagram of what he means by peaking, you will probably get a graph with time on the horizontal axis and some abstract measure of race fitness on the vertical axis. The graph will show cycles of gradually upward trending peaks and valleys (corresponding to hard days, easier days, hard weeks, and easier weeks), culminating in a single high point or a relatively brief plateau, followed by a physiological decline as the athlete recovers from the peak.
Sometime later, a new cycle resumes with a new period of training, ideally beginning at a somewhat higher level than the previous training cycle. Over a period of several weeks, a new peak is produced, followed by a period of decline and recovery, and then the beginning of yet another peaking cycle.
I get the part about the repeated peaks and valleys along the gradual upward trend. A hard workout leaves an athlete depleted, and it can be a couple days, or more, before that athlete regains the racing fitness, plus a little, with which she entered the workout.
What is beginning to strike me as unwarranted assumption, however, is that any training cycle naturally terminates in some sort of peak or plateau as a consequence of all the workout and recovery days in the cycle and, even if so, that the peak or plateau occurs at a fairly predictable moment in time.
Experience tells me it’s not nearly as simple as that. Going back to our state cross country and Nike Cross Regionals experiences mentioned earlier, we frequently ran better three or four weeks later at Nike Cross Regionals. We ran better relative to other teams and relative to our own expectations.
Conventional wisdom says you can’t extend a peak three or four weeks, and especially not a peak generated off a short training cycle such as we typically find at the high school level.
And, there have been years where we performed poorly (according to both our own expectations and the greater body of performances in our season) at state and then bounced back with very nice performances at Nike Cross Regionals. Conventional wisdom, combined with the trend of our performances leading up to state, would suggest we peaked too soon. But, if that were the case, how did we come back so strong in three or four weeks?
Isn’t there supposed to be a period of physiological tanking that follows on the heels of a peak?
Thus, you begin to understand why I wonder if our conventional understanding of peaking is really such a useful model after all.
I can wrap my head around the idea that if you train and race too hard too often, eventually the body negotiates a period of recovery on its own terms rather than waiting for some simple-minded coach to declare a period of rest and recovery. I’ve been the simple-minded coach on the losing end of those negotiations a few times in my career.
The idea that my head is starting to resist is that peaking itself is a natural development of the training cycle and that a peak is inevitably followed by a period of recovery during which racing fitness lies in a state of malaise.
Where I find the peaking model particularly suspect is in that the peak is supposed to occur at 12 weeks (or, in some models, 24 weeks) into the cycle. If the upward incrementing of the training and racing comes in modest enough steps, why can’t the upward trend of racing fitness continue (almost) indefinitely?
And, if the upward incrementing of the training and racing doesn’t come at modest enough steps, then isn’t “peaking” a euphemism that is more transparently understood as the moment before the athlete stumbles over the edge of the cliff from training and racing too hard and too often?
I know where it says that training cycles are supposed to be 24 weeks (and can be easily adapted—with certain inherent compromises—to 12 weeks) in the Daniels Book of Running, but I’m inclined to think the good Dr. Daniels is working more from assumptions at this point that he is in most of his writing. Where is the comparative research on indefinite periods of very gradual training increments versus 12 or 24 week training cycles with steeper upward increments in volume and intensity?
Admittedly, high school seasons are almost hard-wired into 12-week cycles. But, did the state associations just happen upon the optimum length for training cycles, or are we trying to force something to fit a predetermined length of cycle without stopping to ask if there is a more effective model at hand?
Clearly, one limiting factor to how long you can successfully train an athlete more or less continuously is the psychological tolerance of the athlete for prolonged training without a break. And, it could very well be that the main limiting factor in effective training is the athlete’s psychological capacity to embrace and endure the repetition of it all.
And, perhaps it turns out that 12 weeks is pretty near that limit for most high school aged athletes.
But, even if there really is a 12-week window to work with, how do we know there’s a peak or plateau waiting for us at the end of it? Or, by “peaking” do we mean nothing more than actualizing the level of race training where the last hard workout in the cycle ended?
If that’s the case, then the language of peaking is a kind of voodoo-speak that makes the whole enterprise appear a great deal more sophisticated than it actually is. I’ve suspected as much a time or two in my coaching career.
My hunch is that the accepted construct of peaking tends to produce an incentive in coaches to push training a little harder and a little quicker than it should go. You have a limited amount of time and a lofty set of goals to accomplish, so you squeeze what you can out of the athletes while they are under your care. And you do all this hoping for the magical peak at the end of the rainbow because you've been told from time out of memory that it's there waiting for you.
A nice little piece of anecdotal evidence for this hunch washed ashore with the tidal wave of records at last year’s state track meet.
Given all the interruptions to the regular training schedules in last year’s track season, it is unlikely any coach could credibly argue that he had his athletes properly peaked for the state meet. Yet, the Colorado state meet still produced a record wave of records. And, if it’s not impertinent of me to say so, I’ll take an actual record over a theoretical peak 100 days out of 100.
On balance, athletes raced less and had more periods of rest (mostly unplanned) in the spring of 2013 than in any other springtime in our memory here in Colorado. All that unplanned rest meant that training and racing proceeded at a more modest pace than intended. It further hints at the possibility that still greater marks may have been in view had the more modest pace of training and racing, with rest embedded, continued a while longer.
If we cast a glance backwards at our cultural inheritance, none of this should surprise us greatly. Folk wisdom is full of maxims like, “slow and steady wins the race.” One of the original ten etched-in-stone directives of the Judeo-Christian heritage is a Sabbath of rest every seven days. But, rarely is the training load ever prescribed with such cultural inheritances in mind. Where do we get off thinking we are so much wiser than the accumulated wisdom of ages gone by?
As it is, we load athletes, and load them hard. A few thrive at just the right time, and these serve to fortify and reinforce all of our preconceived notions about peaking. A few more survive, and we lament the fact that their peak arrived sooner than our design. And a few end up as huddled heaps of hurting humanity. We dismiss them as “not strong enough.”
That, I submit, is rather flimsy evidence by which to bolster our accepted training paradigm. At some point, we must ask ourselves, “What it would take to count as evidence against the paradigm?” At what point do we entertain the heresy that the whole peaking construct might be a misguided way of thinking about training?