Despite turning 30 last November, I ran my fastest times ever this year: 6.78 in the 60m, 10.55 in the 100m, and 21.26 in the 200m. Indoors, I missed qualifying for USATF nationals by just 0.03s. Outdoors, these were my first PRs since 2022, and my first time cracking 1000 points on the WA scoring tables.

The main change? I nearly doubled my sprint volume.

From 2022-2024, I averaged about 300 meters a week of maximal sprinting (accelerations and flies). This year, I pushed that to 556 meters, an almost 90% increase. At my age and with my injury history, this was a huge risk. But it paid off for me. Below, I’ll detail everything I did to make it work, as well as all the other changes I made this year.

Before you copy me

Some necessary context: I came into the season already strong (2x BW squat, 3x BW deadlift), powerful (1.5x BW power clean, 3.2m standing long jump), and lean (6.2% body fat on a DEXA scan). I’ve been running competitively since I was 11, and seriously post-collegiately since 2018.

A change in volume of this magnitude necessarily increases both acute and chronic injury risk—risk I consciously accepted to try to stay ahead of Father Time. I was fortunate to avoid serious injury; otherwise, this recap would be very different.

If you haven’t already optimized the other aspects of your training, you can improve much more easily by fixing those things. If you value longevity over peak performance, this approach probably isn’t for you.

Volume: the theoretical case

Training volume for sprinters remains contentious. To borrow Hegel’s dialectic:

• Thesis: high training volume reveals the best athletes—those who respond well and avoid injury. Poor responders were never destined for greatness. (many high school and NCAA coaches to this day).
• Antithesis: too much volume leads to overtraining, injury, and burnout. Find the minimum effective dose for each athlete. (FTC / Tony Holler).
• Synthesis: athletes should find their maximal effective dose: the most volume they can handle without excessive injury risk.

We’re seeing records fall across all sports, and increased training volume is a common thread. Distance runners are stacking supershoes, bi-carb, and altitude training. Strength athletes are pushing past 25 sets per muscle group per week. Marathon runners’ mileage directly correlates with performance—the fastest runners log three times the volume of slower ones.

It stands to reason that what works in other sports works for sprinters as well. We’ll have to rely on that intuition, since there’s no science to speak of. Most of the public information on professionals’ volume is more than 40 years old and comes from chemically enhanced athletes to boot. USATF guidelines suggest anywhere from 500-1475 meters a week for high schoolers, a range too wide to be meaningful. Cycles sourced from the Sprinter’s Compendium are also all over the place.

Both sources’ minimum volumes were higher than what I’d been doing for the past few years, so I had some justification for turning the volume slider up.

Redlining training volume

Nearly doubling my sprint volume after so many years of training was asking for injury, overtraining, or regression. But turning 30 narrowed my focus—while elite sprinters are competitive longer than ever (Shelly-Ann this year, Kim Collins and Justin Gatlin earlier), the physiological reality is that explosiveness peaks early in the second decade of life. I didn’t want to stay in the same lane I’d been in and watch my times slowly decline, instead, I chose to roll the dice.

Building volume without breaking

The volume increase forced me to revisit every aspect of my programming. While I kept my overall structure the same as before—short-to-long, two peaks, the basics—I made many small tweaks to squeeze more out of each session while actually recovering between them.

First, I sprinkled in four-week training cycles where I could. In previous years, I’d run three-week cycles (2 work, 1 deload) through the whole year. Switching to four-week cycles produces an extra week of hard training every 12 weeks. Over the course of my year, I squeezed out two extra hard weeks compared to if I had run three-week cycles all year.

I also de-emphasized tempo work more than in previous years. Tempo work traditionally serves three purposes in sprint programs: building work capacity, aiding recovery by “flushing” the legs, and remodeling tendons for more elasticity. I moved half of my tempo days to the assault bike and erg—giving up the (hopefully marginal) tendon remodeling benefits but keeping the work capacity and recovery gains. Doing this helped spare my legs from impact-related chronic issues that I’ve dealt with before, especially patellar tendonitis.

In the weight room, I focused on building strength and power through neural adaptations instead of hypertrophy to minimize fatigue. I switched almost entirely to sets of 1-3 reps through the whole year, instead of the more-standard programming of 5-8 reps per set that I’ve done in the past. While my bench press definitely suffered, I ended the year both stronger and more powerful in my lower body on a pound-per-pound basis than ever.

On the track, I made two significant changes. First, I extended my rest periods from 60 seconds per 10m sprinted to 90. Especially on the tail end of longer workouts, I found this helped me maintain sprint quality. Second, I started including a few short accelerations before max velocity days. These helped prime my nervous system for the workout ahead and added “free” volume to these days.

Finally, I actually committed to the boring stuff—extending my warmup with foam rolling and other prehab exercises, regular PT, and massage. I wore compression leggings after hard workouts, prioritized sleep quality (which could be a standalone essay), and even experimented with sauna for recovery (would not recommend).

Not everything worked—notably, in November and December I experimented with three hard training days per week instead of two. My training times immediately slowed, and my season opener in early December was my worst since 2018. Fortunately, a good deload and return to two hard days got me back on track for January.

A week in the life

I’ve reproduced week 22 of my season below. This was the second week of a four-week cycle, in between my indoor and outdoor seasons.

Date	Workout	Gym
Monday	Exergenie: 3x20m @ 5% BW Blocks: 2x20m, 6x60m	Power clean Box squat
Tuesday	Tempo: 3x3x100m @ 13s, 30s rep / 5m set recovery	Bench press
Wednesday	Off	Off
Thursday	Flies: 6x20m (40m run-in)	Jump squat
Friday	Assault bike: 3x3x15s, 45s / 3m set recovery	RDL Box squat
Saturday	Off	Off
Sunday	Off	Off

Overall, that’s 820 meters of maximal sprinting. Last year, this would have buried me—I sprinted exactly half that, 410 meters, in the equivalent week. This year, the surrounding weeks had 780 and 830 meters, and I set 20m fly and 60m workout PBs the following week.

Surprisingly, outside of December, I rarely felt the extra volume. I almost always felt fresh, or fresh enough, for workouts. The biggest qualitative difference was just how long each session was—instead of 60-75 minute sessions, I was often at the track around two hours. Combined with 60-90 minutes roundtrip of driving the Bozeman Pass and 45-75 minutes in the gym and I was spending almost 5 hours some weekdays just to sprint.

Everything else

While volume was the headline change, I made a ton of tweaks throughout the year. I tried to root these changes in science, or at least in some amount of plausibility, but as any athlete knows, superstition and ritual are as important as anything in sports performance.

Body composition and strength work

• Raced about 5lbs lighter than last year (189-191lbs vs 194-196lbs). My body composition didn’t change (6.2% body fat in my one scan this year). Notably, while my absolute strength slightly declined, my lower body strength-to-weight ratios improved, as well as my absolute power clean max.
• Much more specific hamstring work, especially heavy RDLs, when out of competition. Conversely, I completely stopped hamstring work when in-season.
• Squatted through the entire year, but swapped from full squats → half box squats (January) → quarter box squats (June).

Technical refinement

• Allowing spinal rotation and lateral flexion: I’ve always been a stiff runner, with almost no head movement. I spent a month or so forcing myself to laterally flex my spine à la David Weck’s head over feet. Weck’s got some wacky (Wecky?) ideas, but this is probably the closest to correct—most top sprinters do display a combination of spinal rotation and lateral flexion with each step. I’m still working on fully incorporating these concepts, but even the little movement I have now seems to have helped me be more rhythmic and bouncy at top speed.
• Prioritizing frontside mechanics: As a software engineer, I sit at my desk basically every second that I’m not on the track. Because of that, I have relatively pronounced APT (anterior pelvic tilt). I spent quite a bit of time correcting APT in the gym to try to get a bit more frontside lift. This is another area that I’ll have to continue next year.
• Race modeling: This is the first year where I really feel like I’ve nailed my 100m race model. I’ve historically struggled in the last 10-20m of the 100m, despite having plenty of speed endurance (my 200m PRs have always been just about 2x my 100m). A big part of sprinting is finding the balance between stride length and frequency; when forced to choose one I naturally pick stride length. By cueing frequency instead of stride length, especially in transition (~20-40m) and at the end of races (~80-100m), I’ve stopped “muscling” races and been able to finish a lot faster. In the 200, I’ve been more inconsistent. My two fastest races of the year were when I attacked the back half of the curve more aggressively than normal, but I haven’t been able to replicate that.
• Anthropometric block settings: I tried both Ralph Mann’s suggestion based on the front knee’s distance from the start line as well as the greater trochanter-based approach outlined in this study. In the end, I settled into measurements in between the two. In the blocks, I’m significantly less compressed than before, and my starts are more consistent and powerful than before.

Meet week optimization

Since I’m self-coached and train alone, I show up at most meets without a support system. I attend “home” meets when I can, but Montana is not exactly a track hotbed—I get a few indoor meets and usually at most one outdoor meet where I’m not staying in a hotel. This year, I made several changes to try and optimize my meet week experience, especially when traveling.

Meet week

• When possible, I flew in at least 72 hours before my race, e.g. Wednesday for a Saturday meet, giving me another day to acclimate to the hotel, food situation, time zone, etc.
• I also gave myself an extra day between my last hard workout and meet day—going from 72 to 96 hours. So for a Friday meet, my last hard day would be Monday instead of Tuesday.
• To minimize the impact of travel, I’ve gotten more diligent about using compression calf sleeves on planes, and making sure I’m getting up every hour or so to move around and stretch.
• I’ve swapped away from Chipotle as my pre-meet dinner of choice in favor of lower-sodium but similar options; lower sodium seems to help with water retention and meet-day bodyweight.
• Taking pre-meet workouts on the actual race track has helped me feel the unique properties of the track—the bounciness and tackiness of the surface, where the bathrooms and shade are, the tightness of the curve, the parking or Uber situation, and more.
• I added a 95% effort fly to my pre-meet workout, and targeted ~34-36h of time between my pre-meet and race time (up from 16-24h). Overall, this helped me feel fresher on meet day, though I did overbake the pre-meet a couple of times.

Meet day

• Meet day is often hectic; I’ve started writing down a personal schedule for each race of the day: when to leave the hotel, to take caffeine, starting & ending my warmup, etc. Ideally, I’d be able to just turn my brain off on race day, and this gets me one step closer to that.
• I gave myself much more time between the end of my warmup and race time—up to 20-25 minutes instead of 5-10. I also made sure to take at least one 95% fly as part of my race warmup, which isn’t something I’d done consistently in prior years.
• My pre-race supplement stack is growing—now, on top of caffeine, I take L-theanine to smooth out the jitters as well as Tylenol + Advil. The Tylenol + Advil combination isn’t based on science and isn’t something I plan on taking into next year—I just had a great race day while sick when I used the stack, so I stuck with it.
• I worked with a sports psychologist on techniques to reduce pre-race anxiety. I’d had some long-standing issues with getting too amped up, leading to feeling sluggish or even blacking out during races; these new techniques really helped me stay at the right level of engagement.

Results

I changed my volume, my technical approach, my meet preparation, and dozens of other variables simultaneously. All of those on top of uncontrollable external factors (age, life outside of track, etc) are hopelessly confounded. But they combined to produce times I’ve never touched before.

2024-2025 meet history (PRs bolded)

Indoor

Date	Meet	Result
12/5/24	Bobcat Preview (Bozeman, MT)	7.01, 22.64, 36.00
1/11/25	Wolverine Invitational (Ann Arbor, MI)	6.90
1/17/25	SVSU Classic (Saginaw Valley, MI)	6.89, 6.86, 21.63
1/31/25	Bobcat Performance (Bozeman, MT)	6.81, 6.78
2/8/25	Riverfront Invitational (Spokane, WA)	6.93
2/15/25	Don Kirby Invitational (Albuquerque, NM)	6.86
3/23/25	Armory Club Championships (New York, NY)	50.22

Outdoor

Date	Meet	Result
4/5/25	Brutus Hamilton (Berkeley, CA)	10.80 (-0.3), 21.81 (-3.5)
4/18/25	Oregon Open (Eugene, OR)	10.72 (+1.5), 21.60 (0.0)
4/26/25	Montana Open (Missoula, MT)	10.62 (+1.4), 21.26 (+0.1)
5/9/25	Tom Gage Classic (Bozeman, MT)	10.68 (+0.4), 21.16 (+2.8)
5/22/25	McNab Sprint Series (Los Angeles, CA)	10.58 (+1.4), 10.55 (+1.3), 21.41 (+0.4)
6/22/25	Elliot Denman International (West Long Branch, NJ)	10.72 (+0.7), 10.63 (+1.2), 21.41 (-0.1)
6/27/25	Garden State Last Chance (Piscataway, NJ) 1	11.02 (-1.6), 10.94 (-1.2)

My increase in sprint volume disproportionately targeted max velocity work, which aligns with my PRs being stronger in the 100 and 200:

• 60m: 6.83 → 6.78
• 100m: 10.71 → 10.55
• 200m : 21.55 → 21.26

More telling than the PRs was the consistency. From 2022-2024, I ran under 10.80 just 6 times out of 22 races. In 2025, out of 10 total 100m races, I went under 10.80 7 times and under 10.70 4 times.

My normalized training times tell a similar story. Despite the volume increase, my month-over-month acceleration and fly times were better than they’ve ever been, and I set training records in almost every distance I track.

Looking ahead to next year

There’s one obvious question—can I handle even more volume? I’m confident the answer is yes, with some additional tweaks to achieve it.

Volume

• Target 700-800m of maximal sprinting per week, an increase of 25-35%.
• Montana State’s new facility, opening this year, will have a 100m straight, allowing for longer reps indoors.
• Experiment with sprint-float-sprint workouts for more max velocity volume per acceleration.
• Try cluster sets at 95% intensity, e.g. 3x4x60m with 4 minutes between reps and 15 minutes between sets; a slightly sub-max effort should let me maintain speed through the workout.

Technical priorities

• Continue integrating spinal rotation/lateral flexion work
• Focus on ankle dorsiflexion (currently landing too far on toes)
• Further frontside development through targeted core work

Other adjustments

• Experiment with bicarb supplementation for lactic workouts—to build work capacity even more?
• Try pre-competition massage for upregulation instead of just recovery
• Add dedicated exercises to address my desk-job posture (forward neck, hunched shoulders, APT)

The house always wins

I turn 31 in November. Statistically speaking, I’m already beating the odds, and my window won’t be open forever. My high-risk, high-reward approach paid off this year, and I’m doubling down. Eventually, the wheels will fall off—but when they do, I’ll know I left everything on the track.

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1. Meet conditions were even worse than the wind implies. I finished third that day, behind two athletes with SBs of 10.12 and 10.36 that ran 10.90 and 10.83, respectively.↩