USSA Distance Running Team
Training Philosophy

USSA TEAM
With the USSA Team the most important athletic goal is race performance.  Our training system is designed to prepare each athlete to compete as close to his or her potential as possible.  Great athletes will be made in the USSA Distance Team.

USSA TRAINING PROGRAM
For a runner to improve his or her performance, two things must be made to happen.  One, your physical ability to run fast must be developed.  This is where training begins.  The second thing, commonly overlooked by many coaches, is improving your cognitive ability.  Cognitive ability relates to learning how to race to your potential.  This includes learning how training works, learning how your body reacts to stresses of training and racing, learning about the demands and strategy of specific race distances, and most importantly, learning the skills needed to race to your physical potential.  What seperates good runners from great runners, Olympic medalists from finsihers, is the ability to perform the very difficult skill of pushing your body toward its physical limit.

PHYSICAL ABILITY TRAINING
By this stage in your running career you have experienced a variety of training programs.  Some have worked, some haven't.  It is important to learn from the past, and put that knowledge to work today.  The components of training are the same in any coaches program.  They will be nothing new to you.  But the way you put them together, like a great recipe, will determine their effectiveness.  And that recipe must reflect your individual differences.

There are three physical abilities that must be improved to run faster.  They are Oxygen Consumption, Lactate Tolerance and Speed Reserve.  Each component is related to an energy system that we use to some degree in every run and every distance.  They are not independent from each other, but work in an complete energy system.

Oygen Consumption - This is related to the aerobic pathway.  We all know that running aerobically means