“Feeding the Cats” – It’s for ALL Athletes, at ALL Levels, and for ALL Budgets
If my high school would’ve had baseball, I probably would not have experienced track and field. I grew up playing baseball and the only time I thought of track and field was every four years during the Summer Olympics. When I was in high school, the emphasis was on being a three-sport letter winner. Well, playing football and basketball were givens for me, but the spring season was still up in the air. On the Sunday before spring practices were set to begin, I decided to participate in track and field and at least have my football coaches learn more about me, since they were also the track coaches. As I enter my 17th year of coaching track and field in some capacity at a small, rural Missouri school, I cannot express how glad I am that my high school didn’t have a baseball program in 1988.
Without an all-weather track, an indoor facility, a full set of hurdles, any pole vault equipment and other items common in many track programs — my sprint athletes still have access to sprint workouts similar to those done by athletes from larger schools with much better resources. Even though our mascot is a Bulldog, we “Feed the Cats” and we’re seeing positive results with our middle school and high school girls and boys track teams.
ABOUT OUR SCHOOL/TEAM:
East Buchanan currently competes in Class 2 (five classes total with 5 being the largest) in Missouri. Our program, girls and boys, has two paid coaches for the middle school and two for the high school. So, four paid coaches. We were blessed last season to have two excellent volunteer coaches; one for hurdles and the other for the javelin. To pool our resources, we combine our middle school and high school for practices and the four paid coaches take a group (distance, throws, jumps, sprints, etc.) and coach the grades 7-12 athletes, male and female, within that group.
Athletics within our small school serves as entertainment and boosts morale in the small communities that make-up East Buchanan. It’s not uncommon to see community members that no longer have children in the district show up for athletic contests. Football, basketball, baseball, volleyball, softball and even track meets (at nearby school districts) are “must see” events. Despite the many successful teams we’ve had in all sports, East Buchanan has only two state championships — both coming in boys track and field.
We do not have an all-weather surface to practice on. Our track is crushed limestone and has approximately 4-5 lanes, depending on how many weeds have infiltrated our outside lane. We are in need of some more rock since we’ve reached the point where a spring rain shower can often render sections of the track useless for about 48 hours. I often drive my 1997 Chevrolet pickup to practice with rakes, shovels, and various other outdoor implements in the bed to help manicure our gravel track. The East Buchanan coaches often “create” lanes or alleys (using cones, hurdles or football benches) on the track for athletes to follow because our athletes are not very good at sprinting straight; they’re not used to lanes. We use measuring wheels and field marking paint to create exchange zones for relay practice. We do have a roll-out runway for one of our long/triple approaches. However, it is only 90-feet in length.
That being said, one of the curses of being a small school track coach is also a blessing to me. I enjoy this sport and being at a small school allows me the opportunity to dabble in all of the events and literally coach all of my athletes. However, having the time to get to all the athletes I need to is often a struggle.
We compete in what is probably the best small school conference in the state of Missouri, the KCI Conference. It is not uncommon for KCI schools to be consistently in the state rankings for football, softball, girls basketball, boys basketball, wrestling and baseball. Additionally, the eight schools that make up the conference yearly claim multiple state track and field medals and team trophies.
As is the case with our sport, I am friends with many of my counterparts and I know how good these coaches are and how much time they put into their athletes and programs. Additionally, the coaches I truly respect are constantly looking for new ways to make their athletes better, despite their several years of success. In fact, learning to coach in this conference just made me assume that everyone spent as much time honing their craft as the coaches at my school and other KCI schools, I now know that this is not the case. Great coaches don’t just exist at larger schools… great coaches can (and do) come from all over.
INTRODUCTION TO “FEED THE CATS”
Before changing the ideology of our boys and girls sprint program I was big into intervals: such as repeat sprints at a specific distance (Ex: 12 x 40-60 meters with little recovery) and ladders/tree style workouts at a certain percentage of the athlete’s max with walking recovery. My biggest misconception about sprinting was that we needed to have athletes that could “feel the burn,” “embrace the grind” or that we needed large amounts of cardiovascular endurance to finish sprint races. Our ways yielded some results, but our practices were sometimes not for the faint of heart and we lost a fair share of athletes to the baseball team, professed burn-out and the weight room (which is an awesome facility for a school our size) for fall sport preparation. Also, soft tissue injuries such as quad and hamstring strains were rampant.
However, there were some “Feed the Cats” methodology hidden in the madness I was creating as the sprint coach. At least once a week, we did what we called threshold runs. We did this for 400 meter preparation. At some coaching clinic, I heard a college coach state that acidosis for quality 400 meter runners really started to kick in at approximately 40 sec. So, I had athletes sprint all-out for 40 sec. to hopefully build up their lactate threshold. We also set 300 meters as a goal for the boys and 270-275 meters as a goal to reach for the girls. We did 3-4 reps at 40-seconds on days we did the threshold runs. Additionally, recovery was approximately five minutes in duration. Instead of hormesis, I took a “if a little is good, then a lot must be great” approach. Looking back, the distance, the repetitions and the 40 sec. were all too long, but in reflection there are some fundamentals of the Chris Korfist/Tony Holler 23 Second Drill with this training method.
As I stated earlier, we also would do shorter sprints of 40-60 meters to hopefully work max speed and drive phase. Once again, we did too many, so the number of high-quality, max speed sprints diminished as the repetitions increased. However, even as I was overworking the athletes, I was at least somewhat cognizant that in order to get faster, one must train faster. Knowing what I know now, it’s frustrating to think back at the good athletes that could’ve been great athletes had we trained smarter.
For the last three seasons, I have incorporated Tony Holler’s “Feed the Cats” dynamic sprint warm-up. I found “Feed the Cats” on YouTube after a Google search. Unfortunately, I didn’t incorporate anything else of Coach Holler’s until last season and was unaware that “Feed the Cats” is a state of mind, rather than a workout module.
I stumbled into the “Feed the Cats” mentality because of one athlete.
In 2016 my best girls long/triple jumper, who was a junior at the time, informed me that she had a spot on a top-tier AAU basketball team. However, she also wanted to continue with track and field. Because of the push to earn a basketball scholarship (which she earned a “full ride” at a very good NCAA Div. II school) and the amount of time on her legs for practices and weekend tournaments, I knew we would need to dial-down her training. The reasoning was simple, 1.) I believe the body only has so many really good jumps in it over the course of a season and 2.) the increased time on her legs could result in injury, and that wouldn’t have been ideal for anyone.
So, the athlete and I first opened our lines of communication where we could talk honestly with each other about her training and how she was physically feeling. We focused on sprint mechanics, building max speed, some plyometric work, limited jumps in practice and lots of low-impact jump technique. She never ran more than 100 meters in practice, but most of the time the sprints were no longer than what her long jump approach would be. Because the two of us were so honest with one another, she sometimes took days off practice and focused on being a student and physically recovering from the beating her legs were getting from playing basketball since October of the previous year. We recorded and watched a lot of video. We watched her approaches, takeoffs, in-flight mechanics, landings, as well as jumps from other athletes. In May, she qualified for the state meet and won the state championship in the long jump and was runner-up in the triple jump. After this, you would’ve thought that I would’ve been smart enough to get ALL of the sprinters on a similar plan — I wasn’t. However, I was at least smart enough to realize that if this way worked for one jumper, it should work for the other jumpers.
Missouri State Champion, Josie Fortney
So moving into the 2017 season, the jumpers were Feeding the Cats, we just didn’t know it. Middle school through high school, the East Buchanan jumpers were now doing the same program modeled after the success of the previous year. The only adjustment made to the training of our jumpers, that varied from what our top-athlete did a year earlier, was what we were doing in the weight room. I stumbled across something called the French Contrast Method (FCM) being demonstrated by Cal Dietz at the University of Minnesota. Once practices started, we would do a lower body FCM [heavy lift, body-weight plyometric activity, weighted plyometric, assisted jump, 4-min. recovery] twice a week throughout the season. We also incorporated some exercises in the weight room to aid in hamstring development [Nordic curls, “good mornings,” straight-leg deadlifts, etc.]. The results of these actions, plus the low dosage sprinting, were resounding. Our returning state champion in the long jump won state championships in both the long and triple jumps in 2017. She was additionally a state qualifier in the 100 meters. Our second girls triple jumper qualified for the state meet as a freshman. At the middle school level, East Buchanan jumpers routinely finished in the top-three at meets. We even had multiple girls at 30-plus feet in the triple jump, one of them jumped as far as 34-feet, not bad for middle school. The middle school jumpers that sprinted were also seeing times drop from a year earlier. I knew I stumbled onto something, I just didn’t know what.
In November of 2017, I made the conscience effort to increase my knowledge on the subject of speed acquisition. Then I found the document that changed our program’s sprint philosophy — a 24-page pdf copy of: FEED THE CATS: DATA-DRIVEN SPEED TRAINING. Coach Holler’s notes for a coaches clinic in Wisconsin helped fill in the training holes and showed me why our jumpers were having success. It was now time to take “Feed the Cats” from a dynamic warm-up we did in practice to a mentality for our athletes.
MAKING THE CHANGE
From November of 2017 to January of 2018, I absorbed as many sprint a articles as I could. Some things I liked or agreed with, other material just didn’t apply to my rural high school of 225 students and very primitive facilities. In January, I attended a track coach’s clinic in Kansas City and sat in on multiple sessions with Coach Holler. Following his final session, Coach Holler and about ten other high school track coaches (myself included), talked track and bounced ideas off one another for over an hour and a half. After that, change was coming!
But first, the manifesto. Much like Tom Cruise’s Character in Jerry Maguire, I thought my epiphany needed to be jotted down and shared. I chose a Google Presentation over copies in the mailbox. It was first shared with the other track coaches, then the coaches of the other high school sports. The initial reaction was skeptical. As teachers and coaches, we are often presented with what’s the “latest and greatest” methods to do our job, so I understand the skepticism. However, once people flipped through the manifesto I often heard the phrase: “It does make sense when you think about it.” Here are the reasons for change that I addressed before the 2018 track & field season began:
1. Of the 49 State qualifiers since 2008, over half (27) have come from field events (no pole vault). Teams typically reflect their coaches. At East Buchanan, we have a good history of coaching field events. Increased speed and mechanics helps all field events.
2. ALL field events have speed elements. For long jump, triple jump, javelin, and high jump — refined sprinting techniques often separate good from great.
3. A lot of the athletes that set all of those middle school records didn’t compete (or won’t compete) in track and field for all four years of high school. Some boys gravitate to baseball, some spend the spring playing catch with a football, some boys and girls do moderate weight training in preparation for the fall, some work to earn money at a job, and many (boys and girls) do nothing, often claiming “burn-out.” Going into the 2018 season, six high school boys and three high school girls that have/share middle school track records were not planning (and did not join despite the efforts of many coaches) on joining the high school track and field teams.
4. Very few on the track team consider track & field to be their “primary” sport. We need to change this.
5. Very few, with the exception of field event-only athletes, rarely look forward to track and field practice. We want to change this!
6. At various schools, coaches (regardless of sports) may get together and determine a strength program. These same coaches (boys and girls teams) need to do the same for speed development. SCHOOLS, not just teams, need a speed development program because speed/explosiveness is so vital to everyone’s success.
7. Athletes should be playing multiple sports! Much like the classroom, where we often think holistically; coaches need to be holistic towards their athletes. EXAMPLE: We want to create faster athletes for football, basketball, softball, and volleyball (not just for the track and field team).
8. We need a program that doesn’t break down athletes that may have already competed in two sports. Injured athletes can’t consistently perform at a high level. Some can’t perform at all.
9. East Buchanan High School football is a source of pride for our small communities and the Bulldogs advanced to the state semifinals in 2017. Of the three losses they sustained, all three came to a school that was top-10 in the state the previous spring at the state track and field championships. Additionally, it was clear to see that these schools that beat us played at a faster pace. Some say “speed kills.” I know this… SPEED WINS.
The next WHY I had to answer was… Why Coach Holler and his methods? That was a fairly simple question to answer.
1. He’s a high school coach dealing with high school athletes… just like us.
2. His speed philosophies have spread throughout the coaching ranks and are used by numerous schools. (Speed is speed!)
3. It has been working for several years! (It has worked for OUR jumpers.)
4. His athletes understand, embrace, and WANT to be a part of track & field.
5. This system builds speed without “breaking down (grinding)” athletes.
6. Despite our lack of facilities, I believe we can implement this philosophy without spending any extra money.
With the three other track coaches on board with the decision, I needed to come up with what this would look like with boys and girls; grades 7-12.
PRACTICE STRUCTURE
ALL practices begin with the “Feed the Cats” sprint drills. The sprinters group contains anyone that competes in: 100, 200, 400, sprint relays, long jump, triple jump, high jump, 100/110 hurdles and 300 hurdles. This coming season, the javelin throwers will be added to the sprint group.
♦ Sprint Workouts: We are timing something on these days! We timed a lot of 40-yard sprints (with the wind and on the gravel track). The few football players we had loved this. When we were forced inside for practice, we often timed 25-meter, standing start accelerations. Why 25-meters? Simple, that’s distance we could squeeze diagonally across our gym, it also has a drive phase element. Also, it’s about the shortest distance I can get a decent hand time on. We would usually time three sprints per athlete and I would calculate the average of the three. Results were logged in a Google Spreadsheet, posted occasionally on Twitter, always available on Google Classroom and also posted in my middle school classroom where kids would gawk at the results when they were done with any English-related activity. As time goes by, you can notice the buy-in of athletes because they know exactly what their best 40-yard and 25-meter times are and they are in friendly competition with their peers. I timed all sprints by hand. We don’t have a Freelap system or any sort of digital timing mechanism. It’s not ideal, but properly done hand times can still track growth/progress. I tried once to get 10-meter fly times (two cone setup) by recording video of sprints on my phone and playing the video through Hudl Technique and scrolling. It worked, but always filled up my phone fairly fast. All 40-yard times were in spikes, 25-meter times were in flats (gym floor). We typically did wicket drills and relay handoffs on sprint workout days too; sometimes on X-Factor days too — I like wicket drills. Sprint days are also good days to do hamstring development and FCM after the “Feed the Cats” sprint drills.
♦ Lactate Workouts: Minimal reps, but sprinting (with spikes) over extended distances that do not exceed 200 meters. This is where the 23-Second Drill (we did 24-Seconds due to the gravel) and a variety of other 400-meter sprint indicators are done. In reviewing the season, we did not get enough lactate workouts in during the preseason part of our schedule. This was due to cold and wet weather last year that rendered our track unusable for periods of time. An upward sloping asphalt parking lot can be used, but I don’t like to sprint on that surface any more than necessary and certainly not in spikes.
♦ X-Factor: Short explosive activities (multi-throws, ankle stiffness/stabilization, wickets, plyometrics, force absorption, etc.). As the season progressed, the athletes were encouraged and often came up with some of the exercises for X-Factor, or our leaders at least determined what the X-Factor sequencing should be for the day. These shortened practices allowed for some athlete ownership of the workouts.
Using the “Feed the Cats” model, the plan was to get two sprint workouts, two lactic workouts and one X-Factor workout in each week.
Ideally: Monday = Sprint Workout, Tuesday = Lactate Workout, Wednesday = X-Factor, Thursday = Sprint Workout, Friday = Lactate Workout, Saturday – OFF, Sunday – OFF.
Once meets began, we considered meet days lactate days and we need to control our practice schedule accordingly. Usually this meant a lot of X-Factor workouts following meets. If it is a week where we had multiple meets, maybe at the following practice we would do “Feed the Cats” sprint drills, technique video analysis (if we have any new video to analyze) and/or games like dodgeball, tag, team obstacle courses, or team relays/races (Ex: crab walks, bear crawls, human wheelbarrows, back pedals, etc. over very short distances). We could do sprint or X-Factor workouts leading into a meet because both are anaerobic in nature, unlike a lactate workout.
Once the sprinting was done for the day, athletes that were also in other/field events could train with those respective coaches. Hurdlers do progressions (walking approach with cut step, lead leg, trail leg, hurdle mobility, etc.) each day, but only go over hurdles twice a week and on non-lactic days. Jumpers do extra bounding, ankle stabilization, force absorption, some full jumps, approaches, or specific jump phases twice a week and on non-lactic days.
2018 RESULTS
The middle school program broke three sprint relay records (7th girls 4×100, 8th girls 4×100, 7th boys 4×200). The program was also very close in the 8th girls 4×200 and the 7th boys 4×400.
In addition to setting the 8th girls triple jump (speed event) record, the same athlete was just .20 from the 8th girls 100 meter record.
We brought home two state medals in the horizontal jumps — speed events. Since 2012, we’ve had 16 (girls and boys) qualify for state in the long and triple jumps — we have 10 medals.
We qualified a 100 meter runner for the state meet for the second straight year.
Our high school girls 4×100 ran our fastest times since 2011.
The 7th grade boys were KCI Conference champions with just 11 athletes.
The 8th grade girls finished second in the KCI Conference.
The high school boys finished third at the district meet with just 10 athletes. They finished sixth at the sectional meet (24 teams) with only four athletes competing.
NO INJURIES! The only item we battled was an existing IT Band issue.
25-Meter Accelerations (March 2018 – early May 2018)
Middle School Girls: Dropped an average of .25 seconds
Middle School Boys: Dropped an average of .22 seconds
High School Girls: Dropped an average of .43 seconds
High School Boys: Dropped an average of .23 seconds
40-Yard Sprints (March 2018 – early May 2018)
Middle School Girls: Dropped an average of .51 seconds
Middle School Boys: Dropped an average of .47 seconds
High School Girls: Dropped an average of .63 seconds
High School Boys: Dropped an average of .50 seconds
Notice that the drops in times came over about a 10-week time span. Many schools that have “Fed the Cats” for a number of years begin working out in the winter months, something that is most certainly on our horizon.
While we’re probably not in line to win the Class 2 state championship this season, last year’s results and progress has reaffirmed my commitment to this program for sprint training. What’s more, our entire track staff believes in the system. While some are still skeptical (namely parents and athletes) that you can make significant gains without a “grind” element in place, another year of progress/success this season will continue the conversion of skeptics to believers.
Jeff Harlin
Twitter: @eastbuchtrack
Jeff Harlin is the middle school language arts teacher and girls head track & field coach at East Buchanan (Mo.) High School. Besides being the head coach, he is responsible for sprints, relays, and horizontal jumps (girls and boys; grades 7-12). The 2019 season will mark his 17th season of coaching track and field at some level within the East Buchanan district. He also coaches basketball and has coached football.
