Even though my brain has been trained to start the baseball season during the first week of March, I discovered that some places (like the neck of the woods I currently call home) start much earlier… like this week, the first week of February.
Despite the earlier start, the routine is the same: tryouts, indoor practices, and of course, the infamous “conditioning test”…
The timed mile run.
I don’t know when the tradition of the timed mile run started, all I know is, I don’t remember a time when it wasn’t around.
But I think the standards have changed over time, and not necessarily for the better.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve gotten the chance to talk with a few high school players about their off season conditioning. At first I was pretty impressed that the local high school coaches designed off season programs that include skill work, strength workouts, and conditioning. That was until I heard that the workouts weren’t exactly run according to plan.
There were weeks that teams ran three times. Then the very next week, they only ran once. The week after that, teams ran distance on one day, and then two days later, ran a series of sprints. And then, of course, conditioning was bypassed because (to steal a line from the first Brady Bunch movie) ‘something suddenly came up.’
At the same time, coaches expected players to be ready to run a mile on the first day of practice – under a set amount of time – or suffer the consequences.
Which brings me to the title of today’s rant: the eight minute mile.
Of the high school players I talked to, not one was able to break the eight minute mile in their pre-season preparation. Being the wise guy that I am, I asked if they were running the mile backwards. I mean, I couldn’t fathom a high school athlete running a mile much slower than eight minutes!
And to think, they needed to run the mile in seven minutes or less when the tryouts rolled around!
(Warning: This is where I’ll start talking like an old man.)
When I was in high school, my team had to run the mile in 6:15 at 7:00 AM before school started, so it didn’t interfere with the afternoon practice. (We were on the baseball team after all and not the track team!) If we didn’t run the mile under 6:15, we had to keep coming back at 7:00 AM until we did. FYI – We didn’t have a track, so we had to run across town. FYI #2 – My junior year, I witnessed one player roll over the hood of a moving car – and keep running, because he didn’t want to run the mile again!
The very next year, because we lost half our team to graduation, we were told we needed to work “twice as hard,” so we had to be prepared to run two miles in 13:30. (I don’t know why we were granted an extra minute. I guess the lack of a track and obstacles like morning traffic were factored into the equation.)
Why am taking the Bruce Springsteen route? (“Glory Days” for the Bruce-deficient.)
For starters, we didn’t have an coach-designed off season program to follow. We took it upon ourselves to be ready for the timed run. If we weren’t playing a winter sport, we ran – believe it or not – on our own!
The same holds true for our strength workouts, our “throwing programs,” and of course our time spent in the batting cages.
But I don’t just hold the players at fault here. Despite the fact that there is no excuse for any one player to be unprepared for something they know is coming, the coaches need to take some of the blame as well.
If you’re a coach, don’t design an off season workout program, unless you expect it to be carried out – both by the players and whoever it is you have running your off season “practices.” By designing an off season workout, you are telling your players that this is what you need to do in order to be ready for the first day of practice and the season. By skipping a few days, giving them days off, or just ignoring the scheduled training day altogether, and then punishing the players the first day of tryouts/practice, you are sending several terrible messages to your players that will come back to bite you when the season kicks off, and especially during those big moments where you’re hoping your team will step up.
With all that said…
Running a mile under a specific time does NOT make you a better baseball player.
The best player on my high school team (my junior year) has not run the mile in under 6:15 – to this very day. He did however, become all-state, play college baseball at Princeton, and was named as one of the high school players of the decade for the state.
At the same time, from a coaches stand point, I can see how the mile run can be used as an indication of a players commitment to the team’s “requirements.” Even though the run requires a little bit of cardiovascular fitness, the run is more of a mental challenge than it is physical.
That is of course you don’t run the mile in eight minutes or worse…
Coach Bones
