Event —Trackbuddy Field Notes
How to Plan a Track Season, Phase by Phase
2026-07-07 · 4 min read
A track season is long — roughly October to June if you run both indoor and outdoor — and the most common planning mistake isn't a bad plan. It's no plan: doing whatever feels productive each week until the championship schedule arrives and finds you either cooked or undercooked. You don't need a periodization textbook to avoid that. You need four phases and a calendar.
This is written for the athlete planning their own year and for the parent-coach who inherited a stopwatch. It generalizes across event groups; where sprints, jumps and throws differ, that's noted.
Start from the end
Find the date of the meet you actually care about — the championship, the trials, the one meet of the year. Write it down. Every phase is now defined by its distance from that date. Planning forward from October produces a plan for October; planning backward from the goal meet produces a season.
The four phases
| Phase | Rough timing | The point | What training looks like |
|---|---|---|---|
| GPP | Oct–Dec | Build the base that survives the year | General strength, circuits, hills, tempo volume (e.g. 8×200 @ 70%, 2' rest), drills, technique at low intensity |
| Indoor / specific prep | Jan–Feb | Convert base into event-specific work | Speed development, short approaches and stands, heavier implements, some racing short events |
| Outdoor | Mar–May | Race-specific fitness, full-length everything | Speed endurance (e.g. 3×(150m+150m) @ 95%, 30" and 8' rest), full approaches, competition implements, regular meets |
| Peak / champs | Late May–Jun | Arrive fresh and fast on the one day | Volume drops hard, intensity stays, full recoveries, more rest than feels reasonable |
Three notes on the table:
- GPP is not "get in shape month." It's the phase that determines whether April training is possible. Jumpers and throwers: this is where general strength and elastic work live, not endless approach work.
- Indoor is optional. Plenty of athletes — most throwers, many jumpers — treat Jan–Feb as specific preparation and skip indoor meets entirely. Racing indoors is a tool, not an obligation.
- The peak phase feels wrong. Doing less while meets get bigger takes nerve. That's the phase where fitness you already built turns into times and marks; you cannot cram it in the last three weeks, only ruin it.
Bridge weeks
Between phases, schedule one deliberately lighter week. Two purposes: absorb the block you just finished, and shift emphasis without a hard jump in stress. Athletes who go straight from tempo volume into full-speed work in January are the ones who spend February with a physio. The bridge week is where you also re-test: a time trial, a short-approach jump session, a standing throw series — one honest data point per phase, logged.
A week inside a phase
Keep the weekly skeleton boring and repeatable:
- Two hard days, never back-to-back (the sessions that define the phase)
- One or two easy days (tempo, technique, circuits)
- For a parent-coach: if in doubt, one hard day and a meet is plenty for a developing athlete
- Full rest is training. Write it in the plan so it doesn't get replaced
The phases change what the hard days contain, not the shape of the week. That stability is what makes progress visible.
Mistakes the plan should prevent
- Racing shape in November. If you're running season bests in GPP, you're spending June early.
- Skipping the bridge. The plan looks efficient without recovery weeks. Bodies disagree, usually in February.
- Volume vanity. More total metres in GPP than last year is only a win if you're still healthy in May.
- Never re-testing. A plan with no checkpoints can't tell you it's failing until the championship does.
- Planning without logging. The plan is a hypothesis. The training log is the experiment. A season plan you don't check against actual sessions is decoration — pair it with a simple logging system from week one.
Write less, follow more
The plan that works fits on one page: the goal meet, four phase blocks with dates, bridge weeks marked, and the two hard sessions per week for the current phase only. Detail beyond the current phase is guesswork; you'll revise it anyway once the log tells you how the last block actually went.
That loop — plan a phase, log it, watch the season build — is the entire method. Four phases, one page, and the discipline to do less in June than you did in March.