Here we go again! Last week’s Runner’s World “newsletter-slash-buy our latest book” email is promoting yet another “run less, get faster” scheme. When are these types of issues going to come with the Surgeon General’s warning that this is designed for people who either are just starting out, doing too much, or don’t know how to put a running program together? They say theirs is “more guaranteed than any other program”. Hmmm… I guess they never heard of the one we do, which is not a bad thing. Have I read their book? No. Should I? Probably? Why? Because it really could very well be the ultimate panacea of all running programs or a marketing crock! They talk about a personal best marathon by 19 minutes. Great! We had one of 28 minutes… Does that make our program better? No. Is theirs it the same as ours? I dunno. And, I don’t care either. Why? Because if you are really interested in running, you should be on some kind of running program and not just running how you feel mixed with a long run. Basically it must contain some sort of road map-like structure that looks like you are working towards a chosen goal. There are many programs out there and even a 40-year-old program is better than winging it. However, if you want to get better, you should join a club with people who share your interests, enthusiasm and goals. If you are honest and serious about getting better at your running, then you should be in a club with a long-range vision as to where you would like to go; and not just for the immediate future, but also for years from now. Guess what… we do that, and more, and our guarantee is just as good as theirs.
I had someone tell me again that they heard our program is “competitive”. Why is it when a program consistently yields really positive results, it’s labelled “competitive”? We have 1:30 half-marathoners. And, we have 2:30 half-marathoners. We have 3:00 marathoners. And, we have 5:00 marathoners. These results sound to me like every other club or group in the world that I know of. Where our reputation comes from is from the success of its members. It has been argued that it’s not so much because of the program and more likely due to people changing their running habits over the last couple of years. Absolutely! That’s what good programs do; Train people to wisely change their running habits for improvement. Still don’t believe it? Talk to the participants. It’s been quoted numerous times that people feel that if it wasn’t for “our program” they wouldn’t have achieved the time they did or be in the physical condition they are currently in. None of this has to do with competitiveness. It has to do with being on a good program and you sticking to it.
Where people go wrong is cherry picking workouts and coming up with a program that has no rhythm or logic. To use a popular analogy it’s like mixing orange and apple juice. Although this may possibly work for some people, we have found over the years that it has mainly lead to injury. With many runners it will also create confusion on many physical and psychological levels. Our program is built around “recovery” and therefore, it’s not about competition. It follows our philosophy that it’s not how far, how fast, or how much you run; it’s how fast you can recover to do it again. Trust me, it’s very difficult to teach people why they should be slowing down in order to get faster. This goes against everything most people have learned and even some of the veteran runners in our group still get caught up in running their shorter Saturday long runs too fast or their hills too long and too fast. It doesn’t help either when you have outside “expert” books telling them it’s okay to do it. If you are progressing at a satisfactory rate and you know you can’t rush fitness, why change the rules. Story time!
Years ago I went back to night school and took Algebra 11 because I only received a C- in high school. This was only because, for those people who didn’t pass, we were told all we had to do was show up for the exam we would pass. At the time, despite this “Godsend’, I still wanted to pass on my own accord and ended up with 38%. This always bugged me. The question for me was, did I not pass because I could simply not do it or did I have a bad teacher? I had to know. I was about 25 when I went back to night school and find out.
Karma has a funny way of giving you everything you ask for and I soon found myself with a strangely similar situation as to the one I was in years before. With any manifestation or affirmation, the rule is, “Be careful what you ask for…” The instructor may not have been the same person I had in high school, but the teaching style was strangely familiar? This made for an interesting class on many levels, but I was determined to learn. The plan was to learn Algebra in 2 of the 3 methods being taught at the same time. This way, I had a method of checking my homework before looking up the answers. The other habit I wanted to get into was to not take any shortcuts and workout each step of the equation so that I fully understood how I either came to the right or wrong answer. This also meant that I had to do all my homework at least two times before the next class. I didn’t care. I wanted to “ace” this algebra thing. After all the reams of paper for homework and telephone discussions with the instructor, it came down to exam time!
As the exams were passed around and I looked at the first question, my mind went blank. Here I had spent the last 4 weeks learning algebra in 2 different methods and I looked at the first question and my mind was a blank slate. I started to have doubts about myself and after a couple of minutes decided to approach this from a different angle… cheat! No… just kidding. After a couple of minutes I got the idea to try something easy. I flipped the paper over and started to do an easy algebra equation that I knew the answer to. Then I tried the same method on the first question. Success! I got an answer I felt was correct. I was only able to remember one method and one method only, but at least I remembered something. I slowly and methodically went through the entire exam using the same formula with every problem. I knew I had a few wrong, but I also knew I would pass. As it turned out I got about 68%. That was later bumped up to about 93% because we were graded on a bell curve. Most of the people in class failed the exam.
Now, here it is, an adult night school Intro-math 11 program and almost everybody fails. That just didn’t sound right. I knew the exam was tough and I choked. But for a beginner’s exam to be graded on a bell curve…? there was something very wrong with that. I took the exam to the school board office which was in the same building, told them the situation and asked them to review the exam and tell me whether it was a legitimate test of where we should be at this time. I said if it was, I will accept their answer and admit that I’m not that bright. But, if it wasn’t, I’d like someone to speak to the instructor. The next week the teacher began his speech about the exam. In his own self-defence he said the exam should not have posed a problem to anyone because he gave us all the right tools to answer the questions no matter how hard they were. Several of them nobody got correct. He said that everybody seemed to have difficulty with it and that one of us even complained to the school board about it. He looked around the room and focused on the person he thought did it. I corrected him as to the identity of this culprit (me) and said that he was forgetting several things. This was our class. We paid for him to teach us algebra 11 and that he had appeared to fail at this task. I said his methods and reasoning were unsound. I said exams are more to show that we have grasped the concepts and not to make it near impossible to pass with college level questions. His final exam 4 weeks later was more in line with the level of the program and everybody passed. It took almost 10 years to find the answer, but I finally found out the problem wasn’t with me.
So… what does this have to do with running? Answer: everything. First of all, it says a running program isn’t very good if only very few people will do well. For me it showed that by learning algebra two different methods was a waste of time because when it came down to exam time, I only remembered one method. Similarly, if you try to learn how to run from 2 different philosophies, you will only get confused and in the end up doing only one method anyway. Will it be the best one? Who knows… You are just as likely to have a really good or bad day too. However, like algebra, there may be 3 different ways to get the same answer to a problem, but you really should only do one at a time. This sets a pattern of training habits.
In our program, we try to instil good form, technique, and training habits and improve conditioning; it’s all about layering things one step at a time as your physical condition improves. If you can master one step before moving on to the next, you will see greater improvement than mixing it up with a bunch of different approaches. During your Learn-To-Run stage of training you are introduced to several different training philosophies. As you further your scholastic development you begin to specialize. Once you get past the Learn-To -Run, the rest is algebra and your approach should be more specialized as well. Giving any program 30 days is simply not enough. You have to give it 6 months to 1 year in order to truly appreciate it.
One area of major concern for us has always been the long run pace. Some people insist that the long run should contain a bit of race pace tempo running. If this were a periodization program I would probably agree, but ours is not and I’ve proven our method works slightly better several times over. I believe that race pace tempo running during a long run will cause most people to be either over trained or injured. So far, in our group, I’ve been correct on both accounts. First of all, many of the people who use this method are either injured or exhausted. This is mainly due to people not running at the correct pace; generally too fast. Even if they say they are following our program, most people run their long run too fast and closer to a race pace tempo run than a long-slow-distance run. This means that recovery takes a longer period of time. The faster the pace, the more recovery is needed. This lessens the positive effects of the training run. Trying to drive home the concept that they must get their body feeling relaxed at a slower pace and also guarantee that they will be successful come race day, is no small task. The effect we’re trying to accomplish is eventually getting them comfortable being out on the road in training the same length of time they will be racing but at a training pace. We try to tell them that the work they do during the week on either their speed days and on active rest days are the ones that will improve their overall race time and not simply the long run. The long run enables you to stay out a long time. It is our belief that runners fade in the final miles because not only are they lacking in the physical conditioning to run at that level, but they’ve never been out there in training that long either. Most people collapse at the same place or time as their longest run. We always look at the end result of a good runner and not the number of years that it took to get them there.
I read an article this week on finding the right program for you. It went something like this. You first had to decide if you felt more recovered after long runs or interval workouts. Then, you would choose the program according to your strengths because, “Why would you want to pursue the things you feel are too hard?” Similarly, this logic can be like the guy who goes to the gym and works on his abs, arms, back and chest. He gets them looking the way he wants, but has toothpicks for legs and can never wear shorts. Legs were too hard and didn’t work for him. Runners do this all the time. Even high performance athletes. One well-known distance runner’s coach had said that his runner was more comfortable doing tempo and longer endurance interval workouts. When he did short interval workouts, it took him several days to recover so it was implied that they were not often in his program. Many coaches use this same philosophy yet all of us here believe they are doing their athlete a long-range disservice. Because if you are not also working on your speed, how do you expect to get faster? To me, it would seem if the athlete was tired for 2 days after the workout, then the intervals were either performed at the incorrect pace or there was insufficient recovery between each interval. Remember… it’s not about how fast you run, but how fast you can recover from that run. Everyone is going to differ here… even elite athletes. So the key here would be to discover if the length of the interval was too long and too quick with insufficient recovery for the current physical condition for the athlete? Was this one of those failed “do less, get more” schemes?
When it comes to elite athletes, it’s difficult to know whether they are treating their running career like a business, or do they love running more? Either way is personal choice, but as a coach who searches for ways to make his athletes better, it makes for interesting discussion. However, it seems to me, for the long haul, you can’t have both. It is well understood that the best way to make money in business is to build it up over a period of 2 - 3 years, show a profit and then sell it. This is similar to the way some athletes mold their athletic careers. In running, you used to have to be a marketable success story by winning an Olympic gold medal or set a World Record in order to make money. Runners would get appearance fees, there’d be winners’ and course or world record bonuses. They’d be at the top for a few years and then seemingly disappear. In the movie Chariots of Fire, the Sam Mussabini character told Ben Cross (Harold Abrahams) that after winning the gold it was time to get on with his life. Some athletes after world-class competition continue casual running and others quit completely.
The great success of our program has been to start the program based on recovery from the long run. We start with the long run because it doesn’t matter how fast you are, if your legs do not have the endurance to carry you from start to finish, at any pace, you are either not going to go the distance. At the least it’s not going to be a very comfortable experience. Some coaches feel that all you need, then, is a faster run and a recovery run. But here’s where we differ and why our results are better. We work with a 3-week cycle by balancing short and long intervals, tempo runs, and hill workouts. Interval workouts are designed to work specific muscle groups while allowing other muscles to recover. Again, the paces and distances are balanced with each group according to their available time, ability, and their long-range plans.
This brings me to another misunderstood part of our program. “Intent.” Everyone has the ability to improve their performance should they choose to do so. Even the world’s fastest runners know that if they change a little something in their training, they will get that desired personal best time. We all understand and appreciate that the more time you can put into something, the better you will get, but we also understand some people simply don’t have the time. There are many reasons for this from family to career and other commitments, or you just like to run and are not interested in competition.
If you go to an aerobics class, they put you through a workout that works nearly every part of the body. Some instructors target certain areas of the body each class and revisit them in rotation so that you don’t lose the training effects. People in the class may ask for extra abdominal exercises or leg exercises, but the routine is planned in advance and people do it more for the general workout and social atmosphere than they do to be great athletes. We appreciate that. Running however is a more specific sport. Some people not only run for fun, they train. They train to improve. Some people train because they like the feeling of training not only for physical reasons, but psychological reasons as well. We simply encourage people to run. We offer several programs for people who either want to train to improve or just like to run. What we ask is that you chose one of the many options we provide so that the training is consistent with our recovery philosophy and you do not create any confusion by mixing our program with outside programs. We respect that, like algebra, there are many ways to get to the same ends. This is ours. This is the one we provide. Please respect that not only because our system works really well on its own, but also because we as coaches and group leaders need to monitor progress for those who wish to get better using our system. This way we can add the necessary ingredients into the next program. The outlines of the schedules extend into the future but the specifics depend upon how much progress is made.
Have a great running week! Lorne
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