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.
When you begin training you will find that the longest and most strenuous mental and physical exertions all come at the start…It seems to me that stamina is just as much a mental attribute as a physical one. Make your mind healthy and it will do the rest. If it is not normally healthy, you will never make a decent job of anything.
One of my favourite maxims about training is that the most difficult part of any run is the bit between the sofa and the front door! Mental toughness is, I believe, essential in all forms of running in order to be successful This view is echoed by Noakes and Newton. Noakes devotes an entire section of his book to the mental aspect of the sport. At the elite level, often it is only the mental aspect that separates the medallists from the also-rans. Asafa Powell has held the 100m world record and has run more sub 10 second hundred metre races than any other runner – but on the big occasions he has never performed at that level. Alternatively, Lasse Viren produced very little between Olympics but was twice a double Olympic champion.
For those of us at a less rarified level, the mental aspect of running is often neglected but equally important. From goal-setting to completing events, recreational runners can improve performance through improved mental toughness. Coach Roy Benson, coaching advisor to Running Times, advocates occasional extreme training sessions specifically for the purpose of developing mental toughness. At 18 miles into a marathon, mental toughness is the thing that gets you through. One of the greatest milers ever, Herb Elliott
Was no stranger to training to develop mental toughness. He wrote, “If you emphasize the physical side of training you may become superbly conditioned but mentally not advanced at all. On the other hand, if you concentrate on the mental aspect, it is inevitable that the physical side will follow.”
My favourite thought to remember when struggling in a race is “Pain is temporary, glory is eternal!”
This is another law that is proposed by Noakes but was not one of Newton’s original laws.
To summarise, Noakes lists the benefits of having a coach as:
- to provide inspiration and support for the athlete
- to provide an objective analysis of when the athlete is doing too much
- knowing the athlete and providing the appropriate mental and physiological stimulus
Of course I am going to strongly support this law. For many recreational runners, it is difficult if not impossible to have a relationship with a coach on an individual basis. The danger then is that the runner picks up bits and pieces from books, magazines, other runners and the Internet and applies ALL of it!!
As I’ve previously posted, my coaching ethos is to train Smart. In the coming months I’ll post detailed guidance of what that looks like in practice.
For all my American friends, Happy Thanksgiving and Train Smart!
Bill Bowerman, legendary US coach
Perhaps one of the chief points is to regulate your training so as to be sure of always being on the safe side: the least sign of overdose will surely lead to trouble. Go so far every day that the last mile or two become almost a desperate effort. So long as you are fit for another dose the following day, you are not overdoing it. But you must never permit yourself to approach real exhaustion; you must never become badly tired. A good way to judge whether you are overdoing it is by your appetite. A really fearsome thirst is a definite sign that either the pace or the distance has been too much. Not only are you unbearably thirsty but your appetite disappears entirely, even for many hours after the event.
For professional runners, their life is a balance between peak fitness and overtraining. With closely monitored nutrition programmes, masseurs on hand and several periods of complete rest every day, the only thing the athlete has to worry about is running. Many are frequently injured whether due to a seasonal build up that has been too severe or simply the cumulative effects of many miles run during a lifetime of running. Paula Radcliffe’s latest injury is probably due to this.
But what of us lesser mortals – will we ever undergo the risk of overtraining?
The answer to that is a resounding YES!
Surveys suggest that 50% of runners sustain an injury that prevents them from running at least once a year. Many of these are due to overtraining. It may be doing too much speedwork where there is no speed base to work from, it may be running on unforgiving surfaces, it is most likely to be running too many miles too soon.
It is better to be 10% under trained than 2% overtrained.
To achieve your optimum performance takes years of progressive overload gradually increasing the volume of training your body can handle. Every time the body is injured, the training process has to restart from a reduced level. Avoiding injury through a slower and more gradual progression is the best way to achieve your potential. Law 6 talked about achieving the maximum results with the minimum of training. Failing to follow that law would lead you to fall foul of this one!!
Train SMART
This rule implies that peak racing performance only occurs when a period of high-intensity, low volume training (peaking or sharpening) follows a prolonged build up period consisting of low intensity, high volume training.
The godfather of this approach to training has got to be Arthur Lydiard. Greatest of all the runners coached by Lydiard was the double Olympic champion and multiple world record holder Peter Snell. Although Snell was predominantly an 800m runner, during his base period, he would regularly run 100miles per week. The Lydiard approach would then have the runner adopt a period of hill training before a brief sharpening phase to prepare for the main competitive races of the season.
Peter Snell winning Olympic gold
Following this style of training provides the following benefits:
• It develops robust health
• It conditions the cardiovascular system
• Its slow pace keeps injuries to a minimum
• It fosters a continual slow improvement
• It has a desharpening effect and conserves “adaptation energy”
• It provides strength to run multiple rounds of an event and peak for the final
(adapted from Tom Osler)
So, at the beginning of the base phase, a comfortable pace for our runner might be 7 minute miling. After nine months base building, that comfortable pace will have reduced considerably, say to 5 minute miling. From there, it takes little sharpening to race at 4 minute miling.
When Osler talks about “adaptation energy”, he is referring to that undefined extra that runners get on race day. Osler (and many others) would suggest that this is a finite resource and that if you spend too long speed training, you will burn out and have nothing to draw on come race day.
For many years, this has been the dominant thought in running training circles. However, in recent years, there have been some dissenters. Some coaches would now have runners running hills and speed work in the initial phase of their training as strength work. There is also an argument that although there is a low risk of injury during the base phase of training, this is more than overshadowed by the huge risk of injury when untrained muscles start to do speed work during the sharpening phase. There is a very powerful argument that you never get too far away from speed.
So, where do I stand on all this?
Well, as I have mentioned on several occasions previously, the biggest flaw I see in runners on a regular basis is a lack balance in their training. Many race too often and also run sessions which should be recovery runs as races. I totally understand why this happens and during my running career, I frequently committed similar mistakes.
Why?
For many runners, the thing that keeps them running is turning up and racing. Going out and training is a necessity to enable them to get to the start line in reasonable shape but all the excitement comes from the race. Law 7 looked at whether to race when training for longer races and this law dovetails nicely with that. However, for many runners, the idea of training for nine months to have a six week racing season would be inconceivable!!
My personal view is that most runners would benefit most from adopting undulating or wave periodisation.
What this means is rather than having specific periods devoted to base training, sharpening and racing, you would incorporate all three over a much shorter period. An example would be to spend week one concentrating on base training, week two on tempo training and week three on sharpening with a race at the end of it and week four recovering.
I’ll talk about this in greater detail in a later post.
Until then, train SMART
