The sessions
What sprint training actually looks like
People picture sprinters doing endless laps. The reality is closer to a strength sport with wheels on. A typical week mixes four kinds of work:
Starts & acceleration
Short reps from a standing start: a few explosive seconds, then minutes of full rest. The goal is quality, never fatigue. A start session might total less than one minute of actual sprinting.
Top speed
Flying runs at maximal velocity, the fastest thing the body does all year. These carry the highest neuromuscular cost and need the most freshness; you can't practice being fast while tired.
Strength & power
Gym work: heavy strength as the foundation, then jumps and explosive lifts to turn that strength into rate of force: how fast you can push, not just how hard.
Technique & positions
Low skating positions are brutally specific: mobility, core and endless technical reps so that form survives when the legs start screaming at 150 m.
Go deeper: why sprinters rest so much between reps
The explosive fuel for a maximal effort, phosphocreatine, takes roughly 3-5 minutes to fully restock after an all-out rep. Cut the rest short and the next rep runs on the wrong fuel system at a lower output, which trains you to be slower. That's the paradox of sprint training: the discipline isn't suffering more, it's resisting the urge to.
The engine
Three fuel systems, one race
Think of the body as having three batteries. The phosphate battery is tiny but instant: it powers the first handful of seconds and is basically the whole 100 m. The glycolytic battery kicks in next, burning carbohydrate fast and messily; it's what makes the back half of a 200 m hurt. The aerobic battery is huge but slow: it barely contributes during the race itself, yet it recharges the other two between reps and between races.
Sprint training is really battery management: enlarge the first two, keep the third good enough to recover fast, and never train one while pretending to train another.
Go deeper: the actual chemistry
ATP-PC (alactic) system. Muscles hold a few seconds of ATP plus phosphocreatine to rapidly rebuild it. Maximal power, no oxygen needed, no lactate produced, but empty in roughly 6-10 seconds. The 100 m lives almost entirely here.
Anaerobic glycolysis. Breaks glucose down without oxygen at a high rate, producing lactate and the associated acidosis. Dominant from about 10 to 60 seconds of maximal work; the 200 m taxes it hard, which is why it's a different race in disguise.
Aerobic system. Slow, clean, effectively unlimited. For a sprinter it's the support crew: it clears metabolites, refills phosphocreatine between reps, and determines how many quality efforts a session can contain.
For me there's a fourth actor: glucose itself. The glycolytic system runs on it, adrenaline releases it, and insulin governs it, which is why the health page and this page are really one story.
Load & intensity
Why more is not the goal
Endurance athletes count hours; sprinters count quality exposures. My weekly volume looks almost suspiciously small on the data page, and that's correct. The dangerous number for a sprinter isn't hours, it's the accumulation of maximal intensity without the recovery to absorb it. Sprinting at full output loads muscles, tendons and the nervous system near their limits; stack sessions too close and performance quietly sinks weeks before an injury announces it loudly.
So load is managed like a budget: each session has a cost (how hard, how long, how fast), each night of sleep is income, and the balance, not the total spend, decides whether I'm adapting or just digging a hole.
Go deeper: how load is actually tracked
Every session lands in my database with duration, heart-rate data and a training-load score. The useful signal isn't any single session but the ratio of recent load (roughly the last week: acute fatigue) to the longer background (about a month: chronic fitness). Spikes in that ratio are when bodies break. My platform watches it so I don't have to feel it first.
Intensity distribution matters more than totals: the hard work must be truly hard (maximal, fresh, full recoveries) and everything else genuinely easy. The classic mistake, making easy days medium and hard days therefore mediocre, costs a sprinter exactly the top-end speed the race is made of.
Recovery
The other half of training
Training doesn't make you faster; it makes you temporarily worse and gives the body a reason to rebuild stronger. The rebuilding happens between sessions, mostly during sleep. That's not a wellness slogan; it's the mechanism.
Three signals tell me whether the rebuilding is keeping up, and all three are published live:
- Resting heart rate: my most reliable canary. Drifting up means fatigue, stress or oncoming illness; low and stable means the work is being absorbed.
- Sleep duration: the recovery budget itself. For me it's double-duty: bad nights hurt adaptation and destabilise the next day's glucose.
- Heart-rate variability: a noisier signal of nervous-system stress that I read in trends, never single days.
When the signals disagree with the plan, the signals win. That rule has saved more training weeks than any supplement ever will.
The year
Periodization: planning backwards from race day
A season is designed in reverse. Pick the race that matters (for this season, the national championship on the piste) and walk backwards: weeks of sharpening before it, a speed block before that, a strength block before that, and a broad foundation underneath everything.
The year splits into blocks (macrocycle → mesocycles → weekly microcycles), each with one dominant goal. The point isn't bureaucracy; it's that you can't be maximally strong, maximally fast and maximally fresh in the same week, so you schedule the peaks on purpose. I plan mine in software I built myself, and the live phase is visible on the athlete page.
The extra variable
Sprinting with Type 1 in the room
Everything above applies to any sprinter. Here's what Type 1 adds to my version of it, not as advice, just as my working reality:
- Before a session: glucose level and insulin-on-board decide whether I start now, fuel first, or wait. A sprint session started at the wrong number is a wasted session.
- During: maximal efforts push my glucose up (adrenaline), long technical work pulls it down. Session type dictates strategy, and my closed loop gets told what's coming.
- After: the delayed drop. Refuelling muscles make insulin dramatically more effective for up to a day or two; the night after a hard session is the most carefully watched part of my week.
- Across the season: glucose stability is a recovery variable like sleep. A wild glucose day degrades the next session as surely as a short night does; you can see both side by side on the data page.