Arthur Lydiard, perhaps my primary coaching influence (although many vie for the title), first led me to the workout he called ‘windsprints’ or simply ‘sprint until winded, then float and repeat’.

Lydiard had a very simple – pre-physiology logic – for using this workout. He felt that longer hard sessions left the entire body very tired and needing many days recovery. On the other hand if you sprinted only briefly followed by short running recoveries, you could accumulate a lot of fatigue in the legs very rapidly without leaving a lot of residual fatigue.

“If you run 20×400 metres, you will be at it a long time and you will become very tired; but if you run five laps of the track by sprinting 50 metres in every 100m metres, floating the other 50, to give you 20 sharp sprints in all, you will be extremely tired in your running muscles, but will have taken only 7 minutes to do so. Sharpening puts the knife-edge on anaerobic training capacity without pulling down the good condition you have carefully built up.” – Arthur Lydiard, Running with Lydiard

Based on this he made this a customary exercise during the final weeks of training for races as a ‘sharpening exercise’ and I have been using the workout in this format ever since including our final preparations for the Wicklow Novice yesterday evening.

More than one way to skin a windsprint

Interestingly, Lydiard did not refer to his workout with the word ‘wind-sprints’ in his original (and superior) book (Run the Top from 1962). I prefer this book because it was written in the middle of his halcyon years – it would be another 2 years until he celebrated Peter Snell’s double 800/1500m gold medals at the Tokyo Olympics. In Run to the Top he mentions workouts such as ‘Run fifty yard dashes, alternating each with the customary sixty-yard float, for three miles’.The early book has an almost endless variety of ‘dash’ and ‘sprint’ sharpener whereas the later books settle on a more prescriptive formula for windsprints called 100/100 and 50/50 (or in ‘Running with Lydiard’ 45 metre windsprints every 100 metres and 100 metre windsprints every 200 metres).

Either way you choose to execute this workout (and I prefer using the varied rather than the standardised versions), you have shorter bursts of MAXIMUM speed followed by easier running. Normally, less experienced athletes will be unable to complete more than 6 to 10 minutes of this. I have seen some elite athletes I work with complete up to 20 minutes. Peter Snell, as a miler and half-miler, would have used 2 miles on the track as he describes in his autobiography ‘No bugles, no drums’ (called so because there are no bugles and no drums in the book!).

During the cross-country season we do our windsprints on heavy grass because attaining maximum speed is not our goal – rather it is tiring our legs quickly with an effort that feels similar to what will happen at the very end of the cross-country races.

For ease of execution I place four big cones on each corner of the GAA pitch we use for sessions and we use the long sides (roughly 110-120 metres) for the ‘sprint’ and the short side (90-100 metres) for the ‘float’.

Coaching instructions

My instructions to our team were, from memory, as follows:

1. Go for fastest possible speed but ease in the first one or two
2. Stop the workout once you can no longer maintain proper sprint speed
3. Look for a feeling of heavy fatigue in the legs if possible
4. Stop at 10 minutes if not done before then

Runners recently returned from injury were told to test their legs with relaxed strides rather than all out sprints but otherwise follow along with the format.

As the workout can be very testing, although brief, we do a very long warmup – 3 km of easy running minimum followed by 400 metres of ‘Indian/Brazilian run’ (running in a column formation with the back runner sprinting to the front – basically an exercise in acceleration and overtaking) and then some hurdling and jumping over low and high hurdles.

Because I did not want people over-cooked I explained that ‘most athletes have had plenty at 10 repeats’ which the group took to heart and everyone stopped at that number. Unfortunately, I had lost count myself and decided to continue running until 10 minutes – getting me 12 repeats. This was of no consequence as my quality (i.e. speed and running form) had not begun to drop very much.  I refer here again to Lydiard’s principle to ‘train what you want to happen, not what you don’t want to happen’ or ‘train to failure, train to fail’.

How it feels

The first one or two can feel deceptively easy but then it begins to catch up on you and the ‘float’ tends to begin to slow down noticeable (you can see this here in my workout).

However, if done well an experienced athlete can stay very steady. I began with a number of 22 second repeats followed by a few 21 second ones. I never went slower than 23 seconds. This fits with another principle I believe in ‘controlled aggression’ (to be violated during the late stage of races and the odd ‘come to Jesus’ workout but not habitually).

I noticed that towards the end of every sprint I felt exactly like I would do at the end of a race desperately fighting my way over the finish line. The little red cone became my whole world for a few brief seconds. Having this experience almost twelve times during a session helps up the capacity for what discomfort we believe we can accept.

The adrenaline boost from the workout is rather large so expect to be hyper the evening after doing it. Personally, I can still feel the adrenaline in the body as  I write this 15 hours later!

For a more technical ‘blow by blow’ set of instructions on how to do wind-sprints refer to my earlier post on ChampionsEverywhere on the workout.

Modern perspectives

A lot of research has gone into the area of ‘priming’ which has shown that the best way to prepare for a race is not always to ease off completely. Neuromuscular strength gains from better coordination and training of the nervous system and brain can be attained very quickly – within a few days sometimes and thus be of benefit to the race whereas benefits to overall fitness happen much slower. Workouts like windsprints are a huge stimulus to the nervous system because the top speeds means the brain has to recruit pretty much ALL AVAILABLE MUSCLE FIBRES. There is much research and practical experience to suggest this can be very helpful on race day as long as it is not done too hard too close to the event.