Quote of the Day — Vin Lananna on Hard Work
“We’re not working hard enough.” — Vin Lananna
In the late-1990s Coach Lananna’s Stanford distance runners had finished a tough 2K ladder workout. He was very pleased with the results. His top 8 men had ran 2,000m—1600m—1200m—800m—400m in 5:35, 4:16, 3:09, 2:03, and :57, with 400m recovery between each rep.
These were the fastest times he’d ever had runners record for this workout.
At that time, Agent and coach Kim McDonald had a group of professional runners from Kenya in Palo Alto for a training camp. Coincidentally, this group was doing the same workout the following day.
The next day, Coach Lananna went to the track to observe the pros. He recorded their times for the session to compare to his college men.
The pro group did the ladder workout in the following times: 4:59, 3:58, 2:57, 1:56, :52.
Coach Lananna was shocked. After watching the pros a light went off in his head: “Before witnessing that workout I thought my team was working plenty hard. After seeing that workout I realized we weren’t working hard enough.”
Coach Lananna changed his training philosophy to focus on increasing running speed before increasing running volumes. It worked. His Stanford (and later Oregon) teams went on to be dominate runners in the NCAA ever since.
Running a lot of volume is hard work. But running a lot of miles alone is not working hard enough. To run fast you must train fast.