How to control when you peak?

I have been running for 6 months and started with a 25:21 km in a race in the summer. Now in Canada for middle school XC is different. We race 2.5km and only have two meets if we make the cut for the first meet. I ran pretty well the first race and then the second race was in October and i did horrible. then I started peaking in late november( running sub 5:00 p/km pace mostly 4:20 for each km now instead over 5) I ran a 21:45 training run at an easy pace. So I want to be able to control my peak so I peak for my 800m in track. (ran a 2:24 time trial though acouple weeks ago in grade 7 ran a 3:19 when i wasn't running) So how do you build up to that peak at the right time? The fastest kid in our school ran a 2:28 at the finals and a 2:44 at our school. So I want a sub 2:20 800m for April or May.

Well for middle school, you're going to peak by continuing your workouts and mileage/km training and when it comes closer to your peak the intensity of interval/speed workouts increase as the miles/km start to slow down. Use at least two weeks to start your breakdown phase and you should be fine. Your coach will peak you fine. You don't have to get the absolute apex of your training, you'll be up there.

CT Track wrote:Well for middle school, you're going to peak by continuing your workouts and mileage/km training and when it comes closer to your peak the intensity of interval/speed workouts increase as the miles/km start to slow down. Use at least two weeks to start your breakdown phase and you should be fine. Your coach will peak you fine. You don't have to get the absolute apex of your training, you'll be up there.

We don't have a coach for track. We just race one day and the people who egt 1st or 2nd go on to thenext place. We do no training at all. Also our XC coach knows barely anything about running. She just makes us go run 2.5km.

Running long and semi-easy in base, and the having speed workouts in the season. the intervals, or amount of time you are doing speed, should decrease as the season goes on.

Running easy is an oxymoron. Don't make me bust out the whole Izumi quote.

CT Track wrote:Running easy is an oxymoron. Don't make me bust out the whole Izumi quote.

lol

CT Track wrote:Running easy is an oxymoron. Don't make me bust out the whole Izumi quote.

As a university athlete you should at least understand the need to go easy on recovery days. . .

I was referring to a quote, and no, we don't actually have recovery days.

CT Track wrote:I was referring to a quote, and no, we don't actually have recovery days.

That's surprising. We get 1 rest day a week, and 1/2 easy days (ok, they're not easy, just easy in comparison to the "hard" days)

You should be able to do 2 20 quite easily by just running, do some fartleks and things, but when i was 13 i did a 2 16 with only two weeks running