I have to confess that I have a bit of an obsession for buying books about running, predominantly about running training. If I were to pick one area that was consistently undervalued, it would be the holism of training. Many runners obsess about how many miles they’ve done without ever consider what happens during the rest of the week when they are not training. Noakes identifies the four main factors that impact performance when training hard:

Eating an appropriate diet
Getting the right amount of sleep
Avoiding physical effort that it not training related
Reducing work stress

A professional runner has systems in place to manage these things. Masseurs and physios help with recovery between sessions, diet is closely analysed and managed and our runner has no other exertion to concentrate on other than training. Unfortunately, the vast majority of us do not have the good fortune (or talent!!) to be in that position.

Some of these areas may be very difficult to manage giving other conditions in your life. For example, as a parent of a young baby you may not be able to get the right amount of sleep. In my day job, I work a rapid rotation shift pattern that means I spend a third of my working life working nights. Even though I have had more years than I care to remember working shifts, I still regularly struggle with my sleep pattern. Until I retire, I will continue to face that. Therefore, I need to consider the holism of training and account for my variations in sleep in my training. So, I concentrate my hardest training efforts on my days off and on those days where I know that I will struggle for sleep, I either train very lightly or take the day off.

Similarly, a person working in a job involving considerable amounts of manual labour will need to manage their energy levels to ensure that their training is having a positive and not negative effect on their overall health and fitness.

Why is this important?

Many running books contain training programmes that are written by coaches who coach runners who are full time athletes or full time students – people who have very little stress to manage beyond their training efforts. For runners with full time job and family responsibilities, the stresses of all of life’s challenges have to be considered in conjunction with the stresses from running and the level of training needs to be modified to prevent overtraining and illness and to maximise performance.

Train Smart.