This final stage is the shortest of all of them, normally for me with my high school runners it falls in the last 2-4 weeks of the season, leading up to Regionals and the State meet. I often look at my runners and if they are looking pretty worn down at the end of the season I will start this phase a week early, but I don't want to go too early in fear of having them reach their peak to quickly.
One key tip for this is that I don't drop their mileage significantly. I may take 1-2 miles off any given run each day, and the long run falls to roughly 8-10 miles tops for boys and 7-8 tops for girls, with no long run in the last 2 weeks of the season.
As for workouts, the key is to give them good, quality work that will get their legs feeling fresh and ready to race, while making sure no single workout is too tough to make a quick recovery. An example workout I do is to have my runners run our 5k cross country course and I mark off areas to begin pickups and recovery with alternating colored flags. I usually just do an estimate for distance but make the pickups anywhere from 200-400 meters, with roughly equal recovery. I tell them, for example to run hard until they see yellow flags, at which point they run a recovery pace until they see blue flag. They then run a pickup again until they see yellow flags, and continue this until they complete 5k. Again, distance is less important than effort, so I just place the flags at varying intervals. This workout encourages hard effort, but by this point in the season running a 5k should be easy for the entire team.
A second workout I do in this phase is sets of 3x600 meters (normally 2 sets) with 1-2 minutes recovery. Here I do a standing recovery to encourage the runners to make sure their legs are getting full rest, and it encourages them to hit the intervals harder. The intervals should be considerably faster than race pace. When the workout is over, the runners have done just over 2 miles of hard running faster than race pace and their legs should be able to recover from this fairly quickly.
The key here is to be sure you can recover quickly from any workout, as you want your legs to be fresh come race day. Mileage itself only drops by about 20-25% per week tops. A drastic drop in mileage in this phase generally causes more problems than it helps. Remember, at this point you are used to running lots of miles (whether for you that is 30 miles per week or 80+ miles) and you don't want to shock your body with too much rest.
That's about all I have for training phases. None of this is groundbreaking stuff, and absolutely none of it is original thinking by me. I took ideas from coaches I've worked with and coaches I've studied over the years and come up with this plan of training based on what I've learned from those men and women. I've had great success training like this, and anyone is free to use these ideas in any way they see fit.
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