Athletics Terminology

I was looking at Cliff Temple's book on 'Athletics Through the Looking Glass' last night: it's a whimsical look at athletics and has a chapter on terminology - eg: Back Straight - where you cough and spit during the race, Home Straight - where you pose a bit and try to look good for the folk in the stand. There are a lot of others and he uses his fictional creation Emily Lustbody as an example of how women should behave in athletics. The whole thing got me thinking about terminology in athletics. At one time, early on in my career as a coach (maybe the mid 60's) I gave the girls a sheet with what they meant. It was a nuisance having to explain stuff like fartlek and so on every time!
Easy ones first. Interval training has nothing to do with the speed, number or distance being run, it refers to the interval between the faster runs. An interval session is one where the training is broken up into bits. The faster runs are the repetitions or reps and a rep session is one where the training consists of fast runs. So if you ask what the reps are you should get a time and a distance; if you ask what the intervals are you should get a time or a distance to jog. Then there is stretching. Any exercises during a warm up are usuallywrongly called stretching. Stretching refers to the muscles and there is a perennial debate as to whether they should be done before or after training - there is a general agreement that they should be done after trainming whether or not they are done before. Steve Cram told Grant Graham and myself that he started stretching after the Moscow Olympics where he shared a room with Allan Wells who did 15 minutes of stretching every night before bed. There are more young girls sent away from Ballet in the west of Scotland because of tight hamstrings - it's a west of Scotland thing apparently. So stretch your hamstrings. Mobility or flexibility is for the joints and it matters because range of movement is important. I'd recomment some mobility work for everyone before the session. Finally there is the warm up and cool down. The warm up is necessary because it would be stupid to go straight into a fast session when the muscles are cold and the joints have not been loosened. So the warm up goes from slow to fast to faster. A very slow jog is followed by some mobility and maybe stretching, that is followed by some faster drills and then there are the strides which get you up to the condition where you are able to do your best with only minimal fear of injury. Then at the end of the session is the warm down which seems to have disappeared from many sessions - maybe it's because for parents who have seen the children train just want to get home so it's straight into the car and off! It's maybe senior men and women who want to get home quickly to see'The Bill' before it ends for good. But it's not a good habit not to do a cool down of some sort.