Just thought I'd point to a comment I posted on Ells' UltiTraining blog on CF that you might find interesting.

http://ultitraining.wordpress.com/2009/08/04/ive-never-heard-of-this-thing-crossfit/

That said, you should really check out the Strength Coach podcast episode 19.5 with Dr. Gray Cook and see what he has to say. Enjoy your return to school! ^_^

~LeslieW

If you haven’t found it already I’d suggest that you track down a copy of “The Lore of Running,” by Tim Noakes. It’s up there with “Sturtevant’s Notes on Edible Plants” as the best at what’s it trying to do. The author has a bias towards long distances, where 10k is practically the shortest distance acknowledged and a standard marathon is just starting to get respectable, but the parts about the physiology, particularly bits about seasonal training with peaking and problems with overtraining come from a perspective that seems to be lacking among the ultimate crowd.

If nothing else it’s a fun book to poke around in and read about the guy who trained for 20 weeks and won the ninety kilometer Comrades Marathon. That’s pretty badass.

Andy

I’d offer that part of playing like the best is training like them–perhaps your points take longer at the pickup/league level because people are slower and can’t attack space as quickly, to go with the skill disparity between pickup and elite ultimate. And don’t forget, turnovers often count as stoppages, providing a break to recover–we’re still talking about relatively short intervals of work with interspersed rest. Those long points, especially in pickup/league, tend to be filled with your long, slow walk-ups while the experienced guy yells at everyone else to get in a stack and make cuts, etc.

I don’t know that runs in that range are necessarily destructive to speed–certainly there’s some effect, but if you’re doing that sort of distance relatively infrequently and training strength/explosiveness/speed in the meantime with much greater frequency, I wouldn’t worry too much.

That said, …I don’t do much beyond a 100 or 200m when I’m in-season outside of warm-ups and cool-down runs.

My advice is to make sure you add diagonal cuts into your sprint workout, and make sure that you vary your distance; turning after a 5m cut is much different than turning after 20m.

-Bill Mill
I’m not a certified trainer, but I did stay at a holiday inn express last night

just thought I’d chip in with a comment on tabata intervals which I recently started doing. I first started running them on a track, doing full circuits of sprint/walk. It was hard, but it was also difficult judge and push for top speed for the 20s.
I found it better to run them on grass doing shuttles between two cones about 15m apart – this way working out what my speed should be wasn’t important, instead I was focusing on turning and accelerating as hard as I could. It hurt a lot more and I think it is more applicable to the game.

James (UK)

Another recommendation I haven’t read–while I’m pretty well acquainted with the fitness-related blogosphere (or rather, was at one point), I can’t say my interests have driven me enough to shell out for hard copies previously.

Presently is a different story. It’ll be in the queue for reading in the next couple months; thanks!

On one hand, my Polar F11 tells me I burned 3720+ Calories last Saturday at Regionals in Corvalis, OR (a chunk of that in a game where we got to Universe point against Santa Cruz), which is in the same ballpark as running a half-Ironman. On the other hand I do know that my HR went above 210 at times, so I was definitely sprinting here and there throughout the day.

Another way to put XX's analysis is to note that LSD (long slow distance) isn't the recommended way to increase your endurance anyway, and suggest that folks do Tabata intervals or 15:15 sets like Kenneth Jay recommends as a starting point.

That said, starting out with higher volume and lower intensity then progressing to lower volume and higher intensity doesn't sound like a horrible plan overall (since it's easier to stop early when jogging slowly for longer distances), the question then is, what kind of intervals should one run after one can run safely and slowly?

A lot of the posts above mention measuring distance, but both the Tabata protocol and KJ's Vo2max protocol are time-based rather than distance-based, and I think programming based on time makes more sense than programming based on distance, at least based on what experts seem to say.

KJ's Vo2max protocol has you start at 15s work : 15s rest intervals which would be shorter than 200m, and Tabata would be 20s work : 10s rest, also less than 200m, so even if you're going to work on endurance you'd mostly run for times in the 15-20s ballpark with equal or less rest anyway.

Here's what one CrossFit endurance trainer has to say (ran across this last month):

http://www.gotrimax.com/TriMaxBmac.htm

Anyway, Mackey, have you read Vern Gambetta's book on _Athletic Development: the Art & Science of Functional Sports Condintioning_? I highly recommend it, not only because you mentioned his blog before but because it would be a great fit for someone who wants to coach Ultimate.

He talks, for example, about periodization and planning when it comes to the sport season, something important to think about when scheduling out interval and strength work throughout the season.

I love your book btw, I certainly didn’t mean to hate on it; just wanted to give a data point that shorter, harder training was more effective for me. I did get good at 400 workouts on your plan though

Also, my favorite drill that I invented for training short is run on a football field. One rep starts at the intersection of the goal line and the sideline. Run a suicide of 5,10,15, then 20 yards, but make the cuts diagonally across the field so that you finish at the intersection of the goal line and the *other* side line.

rest for 10 seconds, then run it again.

Since the suicide takes me almost exactly 30 seconds, this gives me nice tabata sets. I do 4 reps, then rest a few minutes between sets and try to do 4 sets.

It’s important to really think about going maximum intensity during this workout.

The conversation can wait.

I’ve already started corresponding with Nate a bit–I think he’s planning to talk to the team leadership this weekend about next year.

Won’t be back in the country ’til late July at the earliest (Zargham’s getting married, and I’m hoping to make it back by then), but we can definitely chat after that (or before, if you care to email).

Anyway, I asked if you were coaching the women because I agree with your original point that XX’s analysis probably wouldn’t apply to women’s college ultimate.

Anyway, I would be glad to see the men have another dedicated coach. Being in Hanover, you’d be much more dedicated than I ever could have been from Newburyport.

I have a lot of ideas / experience with the club – We should chat sometime when you’re back in New England.

The more I think about it, the more sense it makes for me to coach the men. I’m more familiar with their (our) team, after all. Though nothing’s set in stone yet and I’m sure I’ll wind up helping the women when I can too.

Xi,

Last year I pushed pretty strongly for a move away from the 400s and the like in our training–our track workouts were much more heavily focused in the 200m range from the get-go (for Seigs and other DoG folks of a few years ago, we started several weeks into the track workouts when they excluded the 3′s and 4′s), and we shifted to speed workouts–short, hard sprints focusing on acceleration and/or top speed with adequate rest–right around spring break.

We won our first tournament ever (I think) that spring break and our second with a regional title. Not that our training was the sole factor, but it sure as heck didn’t hurt. It’s good to see it corroborated with what you’ve seen.

I’m inclined to do some of my own research come this fall timing games in college open and see if there isn’t a significant difference in length of point, but regardless the intervals within said points are still short and intense with brief breaks.

I have some concerns with training, and training crossfit-style, for ultimate–mainly stemming from the nature of recovery in a sport that goes hard on and off for hours and days–but I don’t have my thoughts well-formulated enough to put into words just yet. I’ll comment if they congeal soon or post down the line otherwise, I’d like to hear your thoughts on the matter.

Jim,

How about this: get some dice. Roll every minute/30 seconds. 1 and 2 are rest breaks. 3-6 correspond to 5,10,15,20 seconds (or pick your interval lengths) of work. Go for 20/30 minutes or what have you.

You could roll on the fly for some drama, or have a coach or confederate roll in advance and keep the intervals secret (this lets you jimmy the total amount of work a bit if you want to amp up or down the total volume).

If you wanted to crossfit-ify the workout more you can do something like Dusty’s card deck workout and have a few exercises to go with the varying intervals (perhaps combining card suit with a dice roll, or simply going by the number).

We used to use a similar system for the occasional workout on the swim team–suit for stroke, dice roll (2 die) for distance and number of reps. Absolutely killer, though half the fun was drawing/rolling and celebrating with your lanemates or giving shit to the guy who drew+rolled butterfly for 6x200m. Ugh.

I tossed out my most generic, heavy lifting biased, cross fit workout and I meant to say as many sets of those in 5 minutes, but as long as you name it after me I won’t complain. I will do it today and let you know how it goes.

I know there is way more to Crossfit then what I tossed out there and I agree with you on how it gets people way outside their comfort zone. Ill be interested to see how you align it with explosiveness and power though. And I want to know more about non sport weaknesses.

Mine is either golf or loving to much depending on the context.

Ben