What about stressing different systems? Like doing hard repetitions Monday with little recovery, and then sprint drills on Tuesday, but with ample recovery to prevent lactic acid buildup. I jog every morning 20 min-I feel fresher, and think it might even have physiological benefits too. thnx for the site by the way-I enjoyed reading it.

What's the difference between my good aerobic pace, 70-99% of my "aerobic capacity" (which I interpret as the point before oxygen debt) and a tempo run? I did that sort of run every day during base building, alternating long and short, and flat and hilly. On a good day, and as I got more experienced good days became pretty frequent, my heart rate was 165-170. (I'm a 16 y old male-not sure what my max heart rate is) I'm doing hill bounding now, and my heart rate gets up to 195-200 during workbouts, and recpvers to around 140-150. The heartrates are just to give you an idea of what my aerobic threshold may be-I don't really have a clue what it is. I just know that I can't sustain 180 bpm for over 3 miles.

Ok-that make sense. They're basically the smae thing, except the tempo runs are closer to the aforementioned 99% and the aerobic runs SHOULD be closer to the 70%. (Mine weren't-I definitely couldn't converse with someone, although several sentences per minute was about it. But that was on good days, which only happened 2 or 3 times a week-now I know why. They really weren't entirely aerobic, they were just barely anaerobic, like when I'd hit a hill.) that's a little confusing the way I said it I guess, but I'm pretty sure I understood what you. But now I got a new question:

The 400's and 800's are anaerobic, right? I was planning on doing those early racing season (August) for 3-4 weeks, mixed with sprint drills. The ladder thing I haven't heard of-but I looked it up and it's either where you run over a ladder, putting a foot through each rung moving the legs as fast as possible, or as a form of windsprints, where you sprint 50m, then 100, then 200, then maybe 400, and go back down the "ladder" 200, 100, 50. I have something similar to both already in my schedule. The first one, running over a real ladder, I do WITHOUT a ladder, just moving my legs as fast as possible, trying to get as many strides in 30 s as possible. (I can get 90 to 105-not sure why it varies so much from workout to workout). I'm doing that right now, actually, alternating it with hill days. The second one, the ladder of distances, I plan to do later in the season, (later September through early October) and I'll sprint 50m, float 50, or sprint 100, float 100, and go around the track 6-8 times. (I'm not sure how many times, really, because I've never done it before). That got confusing, but basically I'm seeing if understand the terms you mentioned correctly. I'm also wondering how many days per week I can do intensely without pulling down my condition-right now it's six, with a long run. The legspeed days (opposed to hill days) have a 3 min recovery between workbouts, so I want to count them as easy, because I never really get tired-just my hip flexors, which is what I'm after for legspeed, I think. Hip flexors are sore from legspeed, quads and calves are sore fro hills. Anyway, I'm very sorry this took so long for me to write, but your advice has been very helpful thus far. Thank you for it.