Richard,Originally Posted by Witton Park
You've met me so you know it is!
I would not disagree with your comment. The stance of the FRA to UKA is "we know best, we've been running our sport for 40+ years, leave us alone and we'll stay within the UKA family, mess with us and we'll walk."
Obviously the Committee delivers that message with tact and diplomacy.
Graham
Hi Graham,
I've already reached that conclusion myself, (despite my initial enthusiasm for the selected AMs idea) : I can't imagine any way that it would work within FRA, UKA or insurance guidelines, and I am wary of pushing athletes towards greater distances. I hope that stating the truth does not make you Mr UnPopular!
I guess that's what I'm suggesting, and/or an ongoing review of both the FRA U18s champs and the U23s champs, if these are open for informal discussion here. I just wanted to highlight a hidden 'longer is better' mentality that I perceive in a lot of fellrunners ~ quite a contrast to the situation when the LCT was developed to build support for the superlongs perhaps!
Regards,
Lauren
It's talking Andy. I talk to people on here in more or less the same way as I would at the club or at a race. It's not really a question of convincing as I don't think there is "a right way".
Even when you listen to endurance greats, you have those that thrived off High Mileage, others off lower mileage. Some question the use of "junk miles" and others extol the virtue of them.
It's really down to assessing the athlete in question, working out with them where their future might lie and preparing them in the best way you can for that. That's the coach.
The sport has to allow the flexibility for the coaches to operate effectively and based on some of the comments I have seen, there's a Ladies National Champ with extensive international experience and a fellow coach of junior internationals and champions who feel that some changes would be beneficial.
So here's what I believe. I believe that athletics as a sport is too reserved in it's approach to producing elite athletes.
I believe that the structure is there to produce club athletes.
I believe that there is an attitude in the sport that tends to portray people who are like-minded to me as pushy, when in fact it's nothing near to the mark. You can see in Graham's comments that the FRA seems to be under pressure from UKA to shorten the distances that juniors race over.
If you look at our endurance runners, we have some fantastic world class VETs. That's perhaps because we are not doing enough early.
http://www.thepowerof10.info/ranking...ex=M&year=2011
I know we are talking fell really here, but I look at it as endurance.
This is the 2011 rankings for 10K Road in the UK. We have to go down to 41st place before we see an U20M and we only have 2 in the top 50. Incidentally one of them a FRA Junior U18 from last season and the 3rd U20M, Dewi Griffiths is also a GB Mountain Runner.
I do sense things are improving though, that opinion is changing.
http://www.thepowerof10.info/ranking...ex=M&year=2010
In 2010 we had 4 VETs in the rankings before we got to the first U20 in 54th position.
If you look at the ladies rankings, you'll see more U20W having a go. That is perhaps why our ladies are more competitive internationally at the moment than our men in all aspects of endurance running.
If you're going to go from my personal experience, your athletes will need to take a 10-year break from high-intensity training / competition and hit the training very hard when they're older.
If you want to know why I backed down on the selected AMs idea, and at the risk of making everyone laugh, it was what I said, with a bit of help from Richard:
And we're not talking about incompetent athletes here. This goes to show that our 17 year olds need to do some tougher Short races, if that's the direction they want to go, and there's no hurry to get into Medium category races. Hence why I think it's worth looking at the U23 championships or alternative race series. As I mentioned in an earlier post, at least some of our most successful distance runners on road didn't get into 10Ks until their mid-twenties.
There is a historical issue with clubs arranging races to just reach the Medium category, I suspect, so putting quite a few races just out of reach of U18s. Metrication may help here and open up a few possibilities.. Or maybe the U18s could have an advance start 300m down the track, making it a Short category for them! This is when I imagine Richard tearing his hair out and saying they could just as well do it as a permitted Medium. But Rules are Rules, Rules are there for good reasons, and there has to be a cut-off somewhere.
btw my training motto is Short, Fast, Often
I would compare the rules in athletics to the methods used in our education system. That is that we judge success by how many we have that attain an average mark.
I was astounded yesterday to read a report in the local paper with self adulation from some schools that they are getting 50% of the pupils to Grade C or above. My feeling is that they aren't aiming high enough.
It seems it is acceptable now that a 16 year old is almost literate.
I think we have a similar culture in athletics.
(sorry post deleted here, due to talking nonsense)
How are you running? Did pick up some kind of injury at the end of last year?
That's never stopped me Lauren
No, no injury ~ it's called a very welcome Winter Break. Lots of people talk about periodisation, yet very few seem to put it into practice!
I did run a marathon, and then 2/3 of a marathon (an experiment), so a good break was needed. Training's going very well, thank you (see earlier mention of Cader Idris almost every weekend). Look out for the 5K rankings after tomorrow...
Good. You seemed to suddenly go missing from the FRA champs last year! Are you doing Lad's Leap?
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