Athletics, Running

You have an entire year to train. Do you run XC? I wouldn't suggest specializing for a sport (i.e. xc in the fall, indoor track and outdoor track) at your age (unless you meant freshman year in university). You could get burned out, and you're still young enough to be experimenting with other sports (again, assuming you're in high school). If you do decide to specialize your junior year then I suppose you could do so.

Logging miles in the off season is always a good idea. This summer I suggest building your mileage base up running every day. It's better to run less every day than longer every other day. In fact if you decide to really increase your mileage to 80+ miles/week this summer (which I personlly think is a great idea), I suggest splitting the runs into mornings evenings. You'll see the same kind of endurance gains with less immunosuppression and possible joint problems. Building mileage up in the offseason will improve you overall VO2 max.

Preseason and season training is about maintaing your VO2 max while building your lactate threshold. This is where you include more speed work, intervals, and fartlek training sessions. As you get closer and closer to peaking, your speed workouts should become shorter and more intense.

An example of preason and early season workouts is:

4 or 5 mile intervals with about 5 min rest in between at 80-90% effort; 7-10 800 m at 80-90% effort with 3-4 minutes rest.

mid to late season workouts include any number of speed workouts including 10-12 400m intervals at 90-100% effort; 200-600-200-600 with 1-2 minutes rest in between at 80-100% effort followed by 5-7 minutes rest and repeated 2-3X. Peaking is always important.

Late season workouts can be even shorter distances: 200m and 300m intervals with 1 minute rest between at near maximal/maximal effort.

Another technique I found worked was to train turnover the day before a race. Instead of jogging 4-5 miles easy we would do a 2-3 tempo run with a 1 mile warmup and cool down. Alternatively, for someone specializing in the open 800 you could do an abbreviated speed workout: 2X200 follwed by 2X400 speed workout with a mile warmup and cool down.

This might not be the exact workout an 800m runner would do, but I have seen incredible results. I contracted mono my senior year and that threw my times off a lot because I had to rest for a long time, but I still managed to run just under 2:00 in the 800. My other teammates ran 1:59.9, 156.9, and 2:00 flat. these were the running techniques we used for XC and track. Hope I gave you some ideas, and Good luck!