Catching Up with B.A.A. High Performance Coach Terrance Mahon

Published by the Boston Athletic Association on November 19, 2015

The B.A.A. caught up with Coach Mahon after recently returning from the High Performance team’s altitude training in California

(B.A.A.) What are your takeaways from the training camp in Mammoth Lakes, California? Did it go as expected/exceed expectations?

(Terrence) I had a few different purposes for the Mammoth Lakes training camp. The first was to put the athletes in an environment where there only focus each day was on their running. Mammoth Lakes is a very small town in a remote part of the Eastern Sierras and was the perfect backdrop for such a plan. When you can get athletes to hunker down and train for a month at a camp it really elevated their fitness.  The second purpose was to expose the athletes to another bout of high altitude training. If you look at the majority of Olympians, Olympic Medalists and National record holders they all include some variation of altitude training in their regimen.

Mammoth Lakes resides at 7800 feet at its town center and with the ability to run as high as 9000 feet or down below 5000 feet within a short drive it is one of the best high altitude training centers in the world. My final reason behind choosing this altitude camp’s time and place was to test its efficacy in relation to athletic performance. To do this we worked with Dr. Aaron Baggish’s staff at Mass General Hospital to conduct pre, during and post camp testing. Each athlete engaged in a battery of physiological tests on the treadmill as well as blood tests prior to leaving Boston. They followed this up with another bout of blood tests after being at altitude for almost four weeks and finally ended the trip by coming down the mountain to compete at the US 12K Champs road race in Alexandria, VA. In seeing that we had our five athletes within the top 14 finishers shows to me that the camp was indeed a success. We had multiple personal bests and one Master’s National record so all in all I think the mission was accomplished.