It is the fashion,it is the world: Speedendurance.com

Wednesday 31 March 2010

Speedendurance.com

Posted: 30 Mar 2010 09:00 AM PDT

This article may be trivia to Americans, but beneficial to the rest of the World who are not familiar with the Imperial system.

You've seen the classic workout of 2 x 352 yards in older sprint programs like Bud Winter and other great coaches.

Why the unusual distance?

To use a very bad analogy, it's similar to buying a "fifth" of a bottle of hard alcohol. It is exactly one-fifth (1/5) of a US Gallon or 25.6 ounces, 1.6 pints, 0.8 quarts or 0.75706 liters. The standard size today is 750ml or 0.75 Liters.

Same with the 352 yard workout. It is exactly one-fifth of a Mile or 1760 yards.

So for Quarter-milers, you should train a distance up to a fifth of a mile. (And I hated fractions in elementary school!)

For metric minded people, 352 yards = 321.86 meters

I always stick to 40 seconds as my golden rule for speed endurance workouts.

Random 352 Yard / 300 Meter Workouts

Bud Winter's workouts consisted of 3 x 352 yards in 44 sec with 15 minute recovery. You would drop 2 sec every month until you can do all 3 in 38 sec. That's equivalent to 35.5 for 300m.

My McGill days with Coach Dennis Barrett consisted of Wednesday's workouts of 3 x 300m with 15 min recovery. I still remember them vividly. The first 2 reps were "easy". I never looked forward to the 3rd one.

According to AtoBolden.com, John Smith's HSI group would do the 3 x 300m workout with only 8 minutes recovery, though his world class sprinters would do them in the 35's range and therefore resembles more of an intensive tempo workout with their top end speed.

According to Charlie Francis, whenever Ben Johnson had a 300m workout scheduled, he would always find a way to skip the workout. And usually he did.

For more information on the "300 meter workout", check out the previous articles: