Indoor Meets: Finding the Balance between Training and Competing

For many track and field athletes, the indoor season is as integral a part of their competitive schedule as the outdoor season. Such wasn’t always the case. Back in my day, the indoor season was considered a training season – a time to get in shape for the outdoor season. While there were plenty of indoor meets to enter, the stakes weren’t high, there were no conference, state, or national championships, and everyone agreed that the “real” season began when the snow melted and the blossoms were budding on the trees. Track was an outdoor sport, and only the hardcore track athletes competed indoors.

Not so much anymore. Track, like every other sport, has become a year-round venture. There is no real “off” season. If you want to be the best, if you want to keep improving, if you want to keep up with the competition, if you want to qualify for that major championship meet, if you want to give yourself a legitimate chance to earn a scholarship or contract – whatever your goal may be – if you want to achieve it, then taking off the indoor season, or playing another sport in the winter, is really not an option.

But while indoor competition might be very useful (and even preferable) for athletes in field events, the same can’t be said for runners, as the tight curves, short straight-aways, and funky distances can throw off athletes’ timing and increase the chance of injury.

For hurdlers in particular, the indoor season provides limited opportunity to shine and progress, as there is only one viable hurdling event (the 55m or 60m hurdles) for the 100/110m hurdlers to compete in, and no viable hurdling event for the 300/400m hurdlers. So hurdlers often end up out of their element, competing against sprinters in sprint events like the 55, 60, 200, 300, 400, and 500, depending on the meet, as well as in relays.

In this article I will discuss the pros and cons of indoor competition for hurdlers, and I will conclude by offering what I feel is a viable solution to the dilemma that it poses.

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Pros:

For a 100/110m hurdler, the greatest benefit of competing indoors is that the 55/60m hurdle races provide you with a good opportunity to work on your start and the first half of your race. With only five hurdles and a finish line, a bad start means a bad race. So mastering the push out of the blocks becomes essential to success, and the improved start is something that will carry over into the outdoor season.

Another benefit is that competing indoors helps you to get race-sharp for outdoors. In track, races are scarce in comparison to the amount of training time put in between races. And as we all know, there is a difference between being in track shape and being in race shape. You can only get in race shape by racing.  Being in race shape means being able to deal with pressure, being able to make quick subtle adjustments during a race, being able to “raise your game” to that next level. So if you have some races under your belt before the outdoor season starts, you can head into the first outdoor meet ready to roll as opposed to using the first few outdoor meets to sharpen your racing acumen.

A third benefit of competing indoors is that it gives you some concrete times to work from, which helps in regards to goal-setting for outdoors, and for knowing whether or not you’re on pace to run the kinds of times you want to run outdoors. For 100/110 hurdlers, the shorter indoor hurdle distance serves as an excellent indicator for where you stand, as the indoor times make it pretty easy to project what you would be running over the outdoor distance. For 300/400m hurdlers, times in any distance from the 200 to the 500 can give a reasonable indication of whether or not your speed and conditioning are where they need to be to hit your target times outdoors.

From a psychological standpoint, competing indoors serves as a good way to break the monotony of training. If off-season training starts as early as September or October, and the first outdoor meet takes place in March, that’s a long time to be training without competing. It can be easy to lose motivation, to wonder “what is the point of all this,” and to lose the competitive edge that is so essential to maximizing one’s potential. And from a coach’s point of view, an unmotivated athlete or bored athlete is a headache to coach, regardless of the talent level.

For collegiate athletes, there is also the factor that the outdoor season is so short. Unless you qualify for outdoor nationals, your outdoor season is pretty much over the first weekend of May in a lot of cases. High school outdoor seasons, on the other hand, generally go into the third week of May, or into June in some states. And considering that warm weather doesn’t arrive in a lot of cold-weather states until April or even May, then the college athlete might have only a handful of outdoor meets in which the weather is amenable to fast times. Therefore, competing indoors, as often as possible, becomes essential.

Cons:

To me, the biggest drawback to competing indoors is that it encourages going too hard too soon, in the cold weather. If a viable indoor training facility is available, then this isn’t nearly as much of an issue. But even so, with the exception of professional athletes, peaking for indoors and then again for outdoors is a very difficult task. Younger athletes whose bodies are still developing put themselves at greater injury risk when training hard in the winter. So, while it’s nice to have a chance to work on your start and to work out the kinks in the first part of the race, the other side of that coin is that you may be forced to practice your start in cold temperatures.

Another con of indoor competition is that it gets in the way of base building. When your training is designed to prepare for races, the assumption is that you’ve already built your base, so you’re ready to prepare for races. So, the question becomes, should we train for this upcoming meet, or should we train through this upcoming meet? Should we not compete in next week’s meet so we can get in more base training, or should we keep on keeping on? The training is different when meets are always coming up. There are more light days, more off days, more race-specific days. There’s less volume, less conditioning. So if you’re competing regularly indoors and training to peak indoors, you may never establish the base you need to stay injury-free outdoors and to run the multiple rounds required in the big outdoor meets.

One trend I’ve noticed is that there seems to be an increasing number of meets available to compete in during the indoor season. More local meets, more national meets, more championship meets. Back in the day, indoor meets didn’t begin until January. Now, where I live in North Carolina, “polar bear” meets (dual meets held outdoors but with the races at indoor distances) begin for high school teams in November. Indoor meets begin in early December. For higher level high school athletes there are major competitions throughout the indoor season, spread across the country, which mean more travel, more racing, less training. For the elite high school athlete, there’s the danger of facing burn-out before the outdoor season even arrives.

A final danger of competing too often indoors is that it can lead to a false sense of security, or insecurity, depending on how well you do. While it is valid to project the range of your outdoor times based on indoor performances, don’t assume that indoor victories will translate into outdoor victories, or that indoor losses will translate into outdoor losses. As David Oliver once said, no gold medals have ever been won at 60 meters. I remember one year when I was in college, my hurdling teammates and I blasted a group of hurdlers from a rival team in an indoor meet in February, but by April those rival hurdlers were blasting us. We were like, what happened? But we knew what had happened. Our rivals had trained to peak when it mattered most, whereas we had put too much emphasis on the indoor season.

Solution:

I think the best approach to the indoor season is to keep the focus on training, on continuing the base-building that began in the fall, and to compete selectively. Target two or three meets where you really want to do well (states, nationals, and maybe one other), and on the week of those particular meets, taper your training and see how you do. If you do compete in more meets, that’s fine, but train through them. Don’t sacrifice the late-race strength you’ll need for the outdoor season by chasing after indoor dreams. The only exception to that rule I can think of is the high school senior trying to earn scholarship money and needing to run fast times indoors. One athlete I coached several years ago had an outstanding indoor campaign his senior year after lollygagging through his junior year, and was able to earn a scholarship to a Division I program just based on his indoor performances that winter.

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