Winter Speed-endurance Workout

Hurdlers can’t run over hurdles every day. It’s just too much on the legs. So it’s good to have running workouts that don’t involve hurdling to remind hurdlers of the need to be athletes, of the need to be fast and aggressive. If hurdlers run with hurdles in their way all of the time, they get locked into a hurdle rhythm and forget to be sprinters. It’s a very subtle thing – it is rarely very obvious, but it happens all the time.

On Mondays I like for my hurdlers to

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get in a good speed-endurance workout that serves as a good speed workout for the 300/400m hurdles, and a good endurance workout for 100/110m hurdlers. This time of year, my focus is on preparing for the outdoor season, even though I know we have indoor meets coming up.

This year my school team has three meets in December – five including weekday conference meets – and I’m training through all of them. The only thing I’m doing differently is adding in some short block work sessions once or twice a week for the athletes who will be competing.

While I have a variety of speed-endurance workouts that I use, mixing different combinations of distances and speeds, the workout below is one of my favorites. It’s one that all hurdlers can do together, serving, as I said, as a speed day for long hurdlers and over-distance day for short hurdlers. Those who do both get both benefits.

The Workout:

• 2x300m, 3x200m, 3x150m

Recovery periods:

• 4 minutes after both 300’s.
• 3 minutes after all 200’s.
• 3 minutes between 150’s.

The rest may seem like a bit much for this time of year, and you can decrease it if you want. My logic is that I want the times to be consistent, and I want to challenge the athletes more so with the target times than with the recovery.

Target Times:

Target times will be specific for each individual athlete. The long hurdlers will generally have slightly faster target times because this is a speed workout for them, their fall base training consisted of more volume, so they should be better equipped to handle the volume. I know what my athletes are capable of, so I’ll give them target times that I know they can hit, but that will take them out of their comfort zone. For example, for a kid who can run 52 seconds in the open 400, I’ll give him a target time of 39 for the 300’s, 26 for the 200’s, and 19 for the 150’s, maintaining that 13-seconds-per-100 pace for the whole workout.

Variations

As I said earlier, you can play with the recovery times as you see fit. If you want to gear the workout more toward the long hurdlers, you could take off a 200 and a 150 and add a 400 on the front end of the workout. If you want to gear the workout more toward your long hurdlers, you could take off a 300 and add 2x100m at the end.

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