I have two questions:

1) How often can you do this workout?

2) What is your categorization of its effectiveness and difficulty level (ie. Hard work out, good for recovery days, intermediate)?

I'm a student of the sport and I'm going to be a head coach next year. I need to learn all I can about distance running as that is my weakness at this point. Please help.

Mitch -

Yes, at the basal level this is very similar to J. Cruz circuits - both involve running and then non running activities to get a long, challenging workout. One level deeper, the Cruz circuits are more balistic - closer both metabolically and plyometricaly to the sprint drills near the end of the tempo warm-up (see the other videos on Runnerspace) where as the circuit your watching is simply slower than threshold pace then hard General Strength, but nothing that can be classified as plyometric or can be thought of as power development (MB HT - med ball high toss is the closest, but she's been doing it for 3 years so it's just something that makes here tired - likely doesn't recruit a ton of motor units). And this leads to the running arm question - that simply an easy way to "squirt lactate" into the system; might be dumb, might be too general and lead to muscle hypertorphy, yet I like it. and I like both the standing and the sitting because you have to use your core to go fast...you simply can go fast with your arms and not engage your core.

Hope that helps - feel free to write follow up and if you joined the RunningDVDs page as a fan then send me your address for your DVD.

Jay,
A coach I work with has a similar workout. She calls it the Cruz after Joaquin Cruz who told her about work he was doing. She substitutes 800s for 700s and exercises are a little different. But interesting that this kind of work was being done in the '80s too. A question I have is why the arm work and why so fast?
Great job as usual with the commentary - very informative.
Thanks, Mitch

800mKing - Good question. It takes 2-3 months of General Strength (GS) after practice before this is reasonable, yet you could argue that in the early part of the season for a 800m it's still appropriate as there is significant lactate involved, yet the work is general and the stimulus is long. But for an 800m runner you might run just 300's at 3,200m pace or 2k - something that is VO2max pace rather than threshold pace.

I love the new workouts that include running. Kind of a nice intro into how coach Jay trains outside of general strength. Gained some good insight and great ideas for possible future workouts.

how long does it take to build up to do this type of work? btw, i would vol. 2.

Hey nice vid.