More people should ask this simple question – “Who have you coached?”

If more people asked this question then more personal trainers – who spent two months studying for a test and pat themselves on the back for passing it – would be out of business for telling every distance runner that TRX was the road to a faster half marathon.  As Vern Gambetta has said for years, it’s too easy to call yourself a coach.

I’ve been blessed to have the good fortune to coach three US champions at three different distances, as I’ve laid out in my bio above.  And while I very much enjoy coaching professionals, there is a great deal of satisfaction when someone goes from 3:40 in the marathon down to 3:20 with just 16 weeks of your guidance.  That’s coaching too.

Coaching takes time.  Time to make mistakes, time to learn from your mistakes and then time to work with athletes talented enough to absorb the training that is informed by the mistakes you’ve made as a coach.  During some of the latest practices I’ve had with elite athletes I’ve taken out elements of the workout that were originally written in, something I wouldn’t have done a few years ago.  The reason to do so were different.  In one case we didn’t want the athlete to be too fatigued after the workout to race well in the next competition.  In the second case it was a simple “engine and chasis” problem.  The athlete has a big enough engine to run faster, but their chasis can’t handle it, so better to lay off the extra rep and live to fight another day.

Again, great question and one that should be asked of every coach.  Thanks for asking me who I’ve coached.  Hopefully I can add to this list in the future.

Note: Having a masters in Kinesiology and Applied Physiology helps less than you think.  Taking a head coaching job at a junior college in the middle of Kanses right out of grad school helps more than you think.  There is no substitute for being a head coach if your goal is to coach as all of the success and all of the failure falls on your head.

I love being a father. The highlight of last week was taking my 4 1/2 year-old camping. She was awesome.  When asked what her favorite part of camping was, she replied “Everything!”  We both decided that when her 19 month old sister is 2 1/2 next summer that she’ll be ready to go too.

Here’s a story that’s just bananas.

Here is some advice from five legendary coaches.

On a more serious note is this story from Cindy Kuzma about this year’s Boston Marathon.

Finally, this story about research that shows the running made the human brain bigger.

Have a great Sunday.

The warm-up for the workout was the Lunge Matrix, 10 min jog, then four different skipping exercises, 50m down and 50m back.

1. Threshold Run: Out 13 min on a dirt path, back in 12 min for a total of 25 min.  Slight uphill on the way back, so you a) have to run conservative on the way out and b) you really need to push the pace on the way back to get there in 25 min.

3 min recovery.

2.  3x400m with 400m float on a 2k stretch of asphalt road.  So that’s 400m on/400m float/400m on/400m float/400m on.  

2 min recovery.  

Run back doing the same 3x400m with 400m float.  It’s just slightly net uphill for the first three 400s, which means the second set of 3x400m can be run faster since they are downhill.  

Now you’re done with the hard running, so 10 min jog to the track.

3. General Strength and Mobility (GSM)

• Medicine Ball Leg circuit.  10 x body squat with MB overhead, right into 10 lunge with twist, then right into 10 MB high toss.  That’s one set.  3 sets total and 1 min between sets.  This is challenging, especially the first time you do it.
• Medicine Ball rotational work.  Takes 5-6 minutes.
• Planks on the MB with knee lifted.
• A GSM routine that is a lot like Cannonball or Grant Green.  Takes 5-7 min.
• Wharton Active Isolate Flexibility Quick Release Routine.  Takes 10 min.
• Legs Swings on the fence from Myrtl.

That’s it.  Three components.  Solid day.

That’s it – one workout and one long run. This schedule works if you give yourself 16-20 weeks. Obviously you need to get the right workouts in on Tuesday and obviously you need to get in some great long runs on Saturday. But the idea that you have to do two workouts a week, plus a long run (so three hard efforts) to run a good marathon isn’t true, especially if you’re running between 3:00 and 4:00.

If your life allows you to run workouts Tuesday and Friday and then a long run on Sunday, great. But for many working professionals that’s not their reality. So trust 2 1/2 days of training a week. Just give yourself enough weeks – 16-20 weeks – to be able to take advantage of this schedule.

What do you believe the keys to success are for the runners coming up from junior high to high school, high school to college and college on?

Great question. Obviously more running is appropriate from ages 14 to 24. And more intensity on workout days and a faster weekly long run. But what else does a runner need to do to continue to improve over a decade (or two) of serious training.

USATF Coaching Education identifies five bio-motor abilities (the “Five S’s”):

1. Strength
2. Speed
3. Stamina
4. Suppleness
5. Skill

Distance runners obviously need to spend the majority of their time developing Stamina – i.e. developing the aerobic metabolism. The weekly long run, the fartlek workouts and the threshold runs, the long aerobic repeats, must be the primary focus of the training if a the athlete is to evolve into a faster runner.

But the problem I have with most training philosophies out there is that there is little or no acknowledgement of the other four bio-motor abilities.

Every year at the Boulder Running Camps there are athletes who will be competitive at their state cross country meet and will be finalists in their state track meets, yet they can’t hold a side pedestal. It’s a joke. They can’t handle their own body weight, let alone external loads in the weight room. You can imagine that this kids are skinny and look weak, but skinny should not mean that you can’t do body squats, lunges, lateral lunges, pedestal work, etc. If these high school athletes want to handle the mileage and intensity necessary to become a better runner they need to be able to do body weight activities.

Here’s an analogy. Everyone wants to work on their engine – their aerobic metabolism, their heart and lungs. Great. I agree. Build that system and build it big. But make sure that you fortify the chassis, making its stronger as the engine gets bigger. If the growth of the engine out paces the integrity of the chassis the chance of injury dramatically increases. And what makes this issue challenging is that, as my friend Mike Smith pointed out to me, metabolic changes occur faster than structural changes.  So there has to be an intense focus on General Strength and Mobility (GSM) for not only the young athlete, but any athlete who is going to run more miles and who is going to attempt to run some of those miles faster than they’ve ever have. Please make a shift in your mind that developing the chassis is crucial as you work on building your engine.

So what about the other four bio-motor abilities?

Speed needs to be developed. Why? The obvious is that if you’re racing seriously and you want to beat the person in front of you at the end of the race you’ll need to be able to change gears to charge past them. Perhaps more important is the fact that running all out is the most specific plyometric activity a runner can do (as it’s the fastest coupling of eccentric and concentric contractions, which is the definition of a plyometric activity). Numerous studies show that plyometric training improves running economy, but people forget to make the same connection with improved max velocity. Plus, from a biomechanical perspective, it’s often easier to cue better posture and mechanics when runners are running close to their maximum.

Suppleness is a problem for most distance runners, yet the runners I’ve worked with who commit to the Wharton Active Isolated Flexibility routines or commit to the mobility exercises in the General Strength and Mobility (GSM) routines I’ve written have fewer injuries. Maintaining the flexibility at age 25 that you had at age 15, or maintaining the flexibility at age 45 that you had at age 25 requires dedication to a flexibility program. So you’ve got to get your rope out and do the flexibility work daily if you want to reach your potential as a runner.

Some may say that running is not a skill, but they’re wrong. Running with good mechanics is important and since most Americans run with some inappropriate forward lean, a few simple cues can dramatically improve not only race times but decrease down time for injury. Posture is key; running erect, with a 1º-2º forward lean is ideal. There are numerous resources on the internet, some saying that 180 strides a minute is a must. Maybe. More important is the time you take to count your strides at various paces and see if it’s within the rages found here. We all have asymmetries, yet working with a good soft tissue professional can help you get more symmetrical. Then you add in the GSM work, add in the Wharton AIF work and you’ll be able to run will good posture throughout the race (rather than running 80% of the race with good posture, then going back to your old mechanics of leaning too far forward, which causes a breaking force with each stride).

This was a great question and there are no doubt many other elements a runner will need to focus on to continually improve from their teenage years into adulthood. That said, I believe that focusing on the five bio-motor abilities is a great place to start.

As the summer warms and many of you are forced to run in the heat, here is an article about muscle cramps…which says that dehydration does not cause running cramps.  A must read.

Is running bad for your overall healthy?  Read this.

Lots of results to sift through between the NCAA Meet and the Portland Track Festival.

Hope you have a nice Sunday.

So how can you break that cycle of running, injury, building up gradually, running well, then another injury?

If you can commit to 3.5 minutes before your run you can do the Lunge Matrix. It works. Do it.

If you can commit to 10 minutes after your run, you can do the Wharton Foot Ankle routine. Or you can do the Eight Week General Strength progression. Or you can do the Wharton Quick Release routine from the Flexibility for Runners DVD. 10 minutes for the two Wharton Routines. The Eight Week General Strength progression takes 10 minutes for the first month, then it take a bit longer during the second month, but it’s never more than 15 minutes.

Bottom line is that most of us can find 13.5 minutes to help us stay injury-free. No guarantees, but the runners I work with who commit to this work rarely get injured. It works. It takes 13.5 minutes.

For instance, a runner may be doing a 40 minute progression run. 20 minutes steady, 10 min faster, 5 min faster, 5 min fastest. They should end the workout saying “I could have run one more 5 minute segment.” If they can’t say that then they ran the progression run too hard.

“I could have run one more” holds true for longer repetitions as well. Let’s say you’re doing 4 x 2k. Those are long repetitions, but you should be able to say that you could have run a 5th one at the same pace, or even a touch faster, than the 4th one. Running a 5th one would have felt like a race and you would have had to go all out, but the point is that you could have done a 5th if you absolutely had to.

Obviously I could have titled this post “Don’t race your workouts” but instead just be able to say that you could have done one more at the end of every workout.

These Q&As are flexible and ongoing in order to best meet the needs of your schedule – write in when you have time.

To be a part of it, all you need to do is:
1. Step in. Follow this link at any point over the next week.
2. Ask me a question or share an idea here during my one week online Q&A “town hall.”
3. Vote on the questions you’d like to see answered.
4. Keep checking the page or get notified when I respond to top issues.

That’s it. This should be a fun experiment for all of us. I plan to start answering the questions on Thursday and I will continue to answer questions on Friday and Saturday. We’ll end this on Saturday, but we’ll keep the page up so you can use it as a resource.

Looking forward to this experiment.