Bottom line any athlete has a certain amount of talent. That talent can be talked about in a few ways. Talent is there for any given amount of time, say a season vs. two years. During a season you may set up the very beginning of it to focus on running drills, core and improving running form & economy through workouts such as bounding. However, by mid season you have switched to more race specific training and less theoretical training; that which forces athletes’ to improve on their personal “theory” of running.
Just looking at the season, talent is worked on in a “theoretical training” way at the beginning, recruiting as much as that specific athlete can learn, adjust to central motor patterns and then in a coordinated fashion display. Then it is looked at in a race specific way, with a quid pro quo as season continues in types of training emphasis. By training for race specifics you are recruiting a predetermined amount of theoretical ability. An athlete with 10 weeks left to the championship meet, has a certain amount of potential. Sleep, nutrition and race day specifics/conditions all factor in but, in about ten weeks not a whole lot of theoretical work can really be overly emphasized with the hopes of bringing around the most success. Unless it is a very beginner athlete, who is injuring themselves through poor form, than emphasizing race specifics the last 8-10 weeks of the season is smartest.
In two years you may structure different seasons to focus on recruiting different types of this theoretical ability and then working on it with race specific that is actually working other aspects of theoretical. Example would be training an 800meter guy for the 400-200meter one year so that the next year he can fully go after the 800-1500meter. During that year he may still do some mid-distance races but overall he is training and racing sprints. The beginning of that first year would emphasize true sprinting drills and acceleration exercises like shuttle runs and medicine ball throws. Also a lot of maximum velocity work with the first six months being 200meter races. This would then lead into more specific buffering for the 400meter race. The next year would then be structured on building that 400meter speed into 800meter during indoor and then during outdoor 1500meter gold. However, in 8-10weeks you can train race specifics so much but you have what you have as far as theoretical ability.
Theoretical ability can be further distinguished by genetic ability. Genetic is what it sounds like and is subjected to the haphazard of circumstance. Think of a seed, it may or may not possess the genetics to grow to be the largest tree ever grown. But, unless it grows in the right place with enough sun, not too many competitors and isn’t subject to the array of other issues like forest fires than the point is moot whether or not it will grow to be the largest. I believe Lance because he is amazing, and certainly not to knock the sport, but how many of the worlds greatest athletes ever really got into cycling? Maybe if more athletes had competed as cyclists there might be four or five more “Lances”.
This all brings me around to my final point. If an athlete has a certain amount of potential they sometimes, and all too often from sheer training blindness, foolishly place themselves in positions of over training. Over training is any time you do more work than necessary to prepare for an event. You certainly do not want to under train, which I define as not accurately recruiting the maximum of your theoretical and genetic abilities in respect to where you are in your season, yearly and multi-year plan. However, the detriments of under training with proper use of multi-system training means athletes might miss their potential slightly, but they will be pretty close. If an athlete is over training they might not race at all or have really off performances. Injuries and setbacks are usually signs of over training. So are streaky performances, both in practices and in races. But most of all, I find that over training leads to burnout in runners. They don’t think they can compete the way they did, so they give up or turn to the most insidious of over training; mileage and the longer races. Since they have never raced longer races they are PR’ing again, but in truth their performances lay miles away from their true talent. They then, like tough guy gurus, think if you don’t go long you just aren’t strong. It just seems like a bunch of macho junk training.
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