Yesterday Maurice Sendak, author of Where the Wild Things Are, passed away. I had the pleasure of listening to most of this insightful set of interviews he did with Terry Gross as I was driving. Quite a caracter.

Last night my 3 1/2 year old and I read the book and I couldn’t help but think of what was said in another radio essay on his life, specifically his honesty in storytelling.  Where the Wild Things Are is unlike other children’s book from that time because the boy is naughty and the mosters scary.  Other books had cute ducklings that were helped across the street by smiling policemen.  My mostly angelic daughter sometimes misbehaves and when she ran across the street last night I hope that her reprimand was somewhat scary.  Thus, childhood sometimes means being sent to your room with no dinner.

I think there is connection between the honesty that Sendak brings to childhood and his children’s storys and the honesty that runners should bring to their training.

For instance, a good way to view the marathon is that you’ve got to be able to a) metabolically use fat/lipid stores as well as carbohydrate (CHO) and b) you’ve got to be able to neuromuscularly run the pace your “engine” is capable of for the full 42.2k. I think Brendan Martin spoke eloquently about this when he said the group he trains in, Hansons Brooks, believes in accumulating fatigue and then doing workouts at race pace. Simple, straight forward approach that yields fantastic marathon results.

If you’re running the marathon you need to be honest that you’re going to have to burn lipids. So if the longest run you’ve done is 17 miles, you’re deceiving yourself if you think you’ve taught your body to use lipids (and conserve CHO). But as my college track coach is fond of saying, “Never underestimate the human capacity for self deception.”

In Coach Patrick McHugh‘s description of training a 4:05 high school miler, Peter Callahan (now running at Princeton), he talks about forgoing distance runs outside in the icy Chicago winters and doing circuits indoors that are fundamentally aerobic, yet have general strength (and specific strength) exercises in the circuit to make the runners better, stronger athletes. Then, come spring, the athletes are strong and can handle a great deal of specificity. And if you read the above article closely, you’ll see they did things like model race tactics (important for middle distance runners) and ran workouts like a 1,100m time trial to get young Mr. Callahan used to how it would feel to come through 1,100m and then be ready to move.  There is an honesty in this training – that middle distance runners need to be strong, need to be able to deal with lactate and ideally, need to come through 1,100m smoothly, ready to unleash something special in the last 500m.

The biggest problem I find when people email me examples of their training is that they’re lacking work at goal race pace. There is a neuromuscular reason to do this and a metabolic reason to do this. Neuromuscularly you need to grove what ever pace it is that you need to run (and there are biomechanics associated with each goal pace as well – specifically knee angle). Metabolically, when you’re running at race pace (assuming the repetition is long enough) you work the correct system, be it creatine phosphate, anaerobic or aerobic. Again, very simple stuff, yet you’d be surprised how many people email me saying they’ve hit a plateau at 5k or 10k and then proceed to share all of the threshold runs and long runs they’re doing, yet lack work at race pace.

My final point about honesty and training is this. Do workouts that psychologically prepare you for the race. A key workout at CU for the 5k was 10 x 500m with about 50 seconds rest (more or less recovery depending on studliness…so 60 sec for me). And the great thing about it was that it felt pretty good, then not so good, then hurt like hell, just like an honestly run 5k. Cross country workouts should be long enough to cause doubt, but short enough to run fast. 22 miles is an appropriate length for a long run if you want to reach your potential in the marathon. Bryan Berryhill, former NCAA 1,500m (who, as an Oregon native, won that title at Hayward Field) liked to run a 500m at 800m pace, jog  the backstretch (i.e. 100m), then run as hard as he could the last 200m, all to simulate how an 800m race feels.

Obviously you don’t do these type of workouts every week, but if you want to reach your potential, you need to be honest about your training and train specific for the demands of your race.

Brendan runs for the Hansons-Brooks team, based in Michigan.  While many of you are familiar with the group, Brendan talks about his experience thus far in the group and their approach to training.  Brendan definitely exemplifies the blue-collar work ethic that the Hansons-Brooks team is known for.

I was fortunate to work with Brendan at the 2011 Boulder Running Camps, where he worked as a camp counselor and I’m excited to have him as part of the podcast series.

As always, you can either listen do the podcast on this page, download it to your desktop, or subscribe to the podcast via iTunes.

Many runners know you from the book Running with the Buffaloes, but may be unaware of your current career as a coach and writer. Can you share briefly your path after graduation?

I earned my masters in Kinesiology and Applied Physiology and then took a coaching job as the Head Track and Cross Country coach at Pratt Community College is Pratt, Kansas. After two years at Pratt I then moved back to Boulder and worked for six years at the University of Colorado as the middle distance coach and recruiting coordinator and assistant cross country coach. From there I moved on to coaching post collegiate athletes. I coached post collegiate athletes in Boulder for three years and three different athletes won national titles.

What are some of the biggest coaching lessons you learned from your time with Mark Wetmore? How do you differ from him as a coach?

Obviously the focus on the aerobic metabolism and building the aerobic metabolism throughout the athlete’s career. A focus on the weekly long run. Basically all of the things someone would glean from reading Running with the Buffaloes. One difference is that I put more emphasis on doing preventive work and ancillary work. My rationale for this work is that you if you can stay injury free that leads to constancy in training and consistency in training almost always leads to PRs. That said, I think my approach to coaching is often misunderstood or misrepresented. It’s not like the runners I’ve coached don’t run. Brent Vaughn had several weeks in the 120′s before he won the US Cross Country title last year. It’s just that he also did hours and hours of ancillary work each week as well. I think people see the videos of the General Strength and Mobility (GSM) and assume that’s the majority of the work, when in reality the majority of the time the athlete is running.

Besides Wetmore, who are you biggest coaching influences?

Mike Smith at Kansas State has been a great mentor and someone from whom I’ve learned a great deal. Some of my core beliefs come for Mike. For instance, he is the person who explained to me that metabolic changes occur faster than structural changes. Said another way, your heart and lunges gain fitness before your bones, ligaments and tendons have the chance to adapt. Or if we use a car analogy, your engine can get bigger before your chassis has a chance to become strong enough to handle it. With this view of training it logically follows that athletes should spend considerable time doing non-running activities to strengthen their body so they can handle more running or more intensity (or both more running and more intensity). I think this is why some talented athletes habitually get stress fractures or other over-use injuries – they spend time cross training and keep building their engine during the their injury, when they could be strengthening their body to handle their talented metabolic system.

I’m also indebted to people like Dan Pfaff and Vern Gambetta who have taken the time to answer questions and to help me understanding how distance running can be view as part of sound track and field coaching, something that I think is often lost in the distance community. I’ve also been fortunate to have Dr. Robert Chapman‘s number on my cell phone for several years and being able to call him when I have a question about exercise physiology or altitude training has been a big help. Finally, I’m an avid listener of the Canadian Coaching Centre’s podcasts and I’ve learning a great deal listening to the world’s best coaches discuss their approach to working with athletes.

You are obviously well-versed in training physiology with your advanced degree. How important do you feel it is to have a strong scientific background as a coach?

Well, given that I spent a decent amount of money getting a masters and a ton of time studying, I should probably say that it’s critical, but to be honest, I think the fact that I went through a rigorous graduate program was more important than the content at that I actually learned. I’ll give you an example. I took a class taught by the chair of the Kinesiology and Applied Physiology department, Dr. Moore, that was focused completely on cardiac myocytes (i.e. heart muscle cells). Now, I never think about how cardiac myocytes contract when I’m coaching, but I have no doubt that I gained some critical thinking skills that I’ve used in coaching. So the fact that even though I had taken exercise physiology and neuromuscular kinesiology and biomechanics as an undergraduate, none of those classes forced you to think critically and creatively, where as graduate level courses did. My first year in grad school I was still on the team and competing (and working as a teaching assistant) so I was a bit overwhelmed, but that second year I really enjoyed both the coursework as well as my graduate project, which was a qualitative analysis with two Sports Psychology professors.

But back to the question, I think a background in exercise physiology is obviously a bonus for a distance coach, yet I think critical thinking and creativity (and thus problem solving) are more important.

When I started working with middle distance runners at CU I wished I had remembered more of the content I learned as an undergraduate, specifically how different muscle fiber types fire and how the nervous system works with the muscular system.

All that being said, some of the best coaches come from other backgrounds. I’m a big fan of sprint coach Vince Anderson and he’s a trained architect. Architecture is about problem solving, but so is coaching. For instance, over the course of seven or ten or fourteen days, a coach working with a 1,500m runners needs to get different types of work in, while also allowing for recovery so that adaptation can occur. For me, I felt like my mental capacity during graduate school expanded so that when I finally had the chance to coach I was better able to come up with solutions for problems (rather than copying other coaches training design).

I don’t know if I’m answering your question or not. I’m really glad I had the opportunity to get a graduate degree, but my point is that if someone has the opportunity to push the boundaries of their mind and expand their critical thinking skills, that’s the key to becoming a better coach.

There are schools of thought, primarily Arthur Lydiard, that strength training is redundant for those who are surrounded by hills. First, do you agree with this sentiment, and second, what are they key exercises that runners who are in the flatlands need to do to complement their training to simulate the benefits of hill training.

Well, strength training is necessary for the 100m – assuming you want to run to your potential. I think the spirit of your question is valid – hill work is great for distance runners and is an elegant solution to the question “How can we improve power and therefore improve Running Economy (RE)?”

I’m probably not the best person to ask this question of. I will say that I asked Coach Wetmore why he didn’t do Lydiard’s Hill Phase with his athletes and Mark’s response was that he had done it during his time as a high school coaching but he didn’t see any better results with that phase than with his periodization (read Running with the Buffaloes for examples).

My view of hill training is simply this. I really like running up a 1% or 2% hill at 1,500m pace early in the yearly macrocycle (100m or 150m). I think it really helps strengthen the posterior chain and I think it’s very safe. But once athletes do that for a few weeks then I want to see athletes running fast on the track. I don’t think we do enough fast running with distance runners. From high school 3,200m runners to collegiate 10,000m runners to adult marathoners, there is a disconnect between the simple fact that fast running is the most specific plyometric exercise a runner can do. So a speed development workout every ten to fourteen days is what I like to see for distance runners, though I’ll admit I get nervous about assigning this type of work in the middle of marathon training.

The other thing we tend to forget is that there is a trend toward more lower leg and foot injuries from Lydiard’s era to the present day and I’m not sure you could take a group of high school kids and have them do the hill work – whether you call it bounding or springing – and not have a high percentage of foot and lower leg injuries. Sprinting up the hill, yes, but springing/bounding up the hill, I’m not so sure. I don’t think the cost/benefit is very good. But the flip side is I’ve simply never used the traditional Lydiard Hill Phase when working with athletes, but I’m sure other coaches who have used it can explain how it works and how it’s effective.

Final point is that I very much believe in hilly long runs and I think that fits within the Lydiard worldview of training.

There are obviously different physiological needs for different events. What exercises are more important for an 800 runner versus a miler versus a 5K runner and what is the variation of intensity versus repetitions for each, as well as exercises invoked, i.e. weights versus plyos? Also, how does the type of lifting change as the season progresses and enters racing and championship stages.

I like how your thinking with this question, but to be honest, this would take hours to discuss. What I will say is that I don’t view General Strength and Mobility (GSM) work or Power oriented work (i.e. Plyos) as separate from the running training…and I think that’s different than most people’s view, especially athletes’ view of the issue. I think runners have been taught the running is the important stuff and everything else is nice…kinda like the frosting on the cake. It’s fine if you have time, but it’s not what is important. When I write training I’m designing all of the non-running work alongside the running and I’m valuing both types of work. Now, this is not to say that in a two and a half hour practice that you’ll spend equal amounts of time of non-running training and running training. But the flip side is that athletes need to value the non-running work as much as they value the running; it’s not superfluous extra training, but rather training that will lead to the athlete eventually being able to run more or run at higher intensities. To borrow a quote for Bill Belichick, “If you can do more, you can do more.” If you can do more GSM then you can do more running. I firmly believe that the western runner is going to need to do more work over a month, a year, a career if they are going to run on the world class level and for that reason I assign lots of GSM work to help strengthen the body so the athlete can eventually handle more running.

I should say that this isn’t something that I came up with – it’s not an original idea. I think people would be shocked by how much general strength work Jerry Schumacher and Alberto Salazar have their athletes doing. For instance, I saw Galen Rupp win the US junior 5k title in College Station as a high school athlete, then do repeat 1ks (at a tempo pace), with his rest a set of hurdle mobility exercises (with Coach John Cook overseeing the hurdle mobility). He wasn’t even in college yet and he was following not only the “hard days hard, easy days easy” concept (so in this case getting in more work on race day because he wasn’t challenged in the race) but he was doing hurdle mobility work while he was getting in his aerobic running.

Final thought is I am moving away from the weight room as a coach. While I love being in the weight room and seeing an athlete do, say, a speed squat to box jump complex, I’m not convinced that I’m getting an different stimulus in that room than I can’t get at the track with medicine balls and shot puts and fast running. More and more I’m becoming a convert to Vern Gambetta’s idea of the “weight room without walls.” But that said, I wouldn’t have that opinion now if I hadn’t had a good six or seven years where I was obsessed with training in the weight room. I learned a lot from the strength coach who worked with track, Vernon Stephens (now with the San Diego Chargers). Being able to go into the weight room and bounce ideas off him was great for my development as a coach.

Also, an intelligent track coach will always have the following thought in the back of his or her head. “Strength Training in the United States often has the goal of muscle hypertrophy, yet muscle hypertrophy is not a good thing for most distance runners. Is this exercise/group of exercises/training day in the weight room sound for distance runners?” I think that much of the work we think is important in for runners in the weight room comes from strength and conditioning coaches who are first and foremost trying to make athletes bigger…and this isn’t the goal of weight room work for runners.

Having advanced physiological knowledge is one thing, but being able to apply your knowledge to training distance runners is another. How do you bridge the gap between knowledge and application?

I think this is where the people skills come in. You have to like people and want to work with people as a coach. People are difficult and distance runners are sometimes extremely difficult (i.e. when you tell them they need a day off or they need to back down their mileage so they can absorb the hard training they’ve done). But the flip side is there are numerous coaches who have no background in exercise physiology and are fantastic coaches. Frank Gagliano doesn’t have the scientific knowledge of Dr. Joe Vigil, but both are great coaches and the commonality is that they are both great with people. Athletes trust them. And that means athletes trust the training, a must if an athlete is to run to their potential.

If you had to pick 3 books every runner should read, which 3 books would you pick?

Stress without Distress by Hans Selye
The Olympian by Brian Glanville

I feel strongly about the first two, with the first highlighting the importance of recovery and the second being a great read for anyone who races. For the third I’d go with Running the Lydiard Way (or any of the other titles by Arthur Lyrdiard) for the simple fact that his training had the biggest impact on training theory. However, it’s hard to implement his training schedules verbatim, yet the broad concepts are obviously important. But there are so many great running books. Best Efforts by Kenny Moore is a fantastic read. For coaches and athletes serious about including non-running training into their training schedule, Athletic Development by Vern Gambetta is a great resource.

What drew you to coaching post-collegiately?

When I was a junior college coach the AD – a former women’s basketball coach – told me not to get too upset about the fact that I’d care more than the athletes care (about getting better). I think that sentiment is often true at the collegiate level, but it’s not true with the right post collegiate athletes. So that’s what’s fun about post collegiate coaching. I could ask the athletes to do a ton of work – a morning workout, then an appointment with a therapist like Dr. Richard Hansen, then an afternoon run, then some GSM before bed. Three training opportunities in one day, plus a treatment session. When you do all of the work and then you see the results, such as an athlete winning a US championship, it’s very rewarding.

But that said, I simply like being at the track and I can see myself working with high school runners at some point in the future. I’ll need to mellow to be able effectively work with that population, but I really enjoy the energy and enthusiasm that high school athletes bring to the sport. They’re the soul of the sport.

As the director of the Boulder Running Camps, you get to work with high school runners from across the country. How is coaching high school runners different than coaching professionals or even collegiates? What specific challenges do you face with high school kids?

I really enjoy the two weeks of the Boulder Running Camps. I’ve also had the chance to work at Nike’s Elite Camp in Beaverton. That said, I don’t consider that work coaching because I’m only with them for such a short amount of time.

The thing that is so special about the Boulder Running Camps is that kids who love running and think they can’t possibly love it any more, often return home loving it more than when they showed up to Boulder on the first day of camp. That’s a testament to the great counselors I’ve been lucky to have.

What prompted you to start blogging and making educational videos for runners? What information are you trying to highlight through these mediums?

Well, I started my blog for one simple reason. After I spoke at a coaching clinic I wanted a place to put the notes and the material that was presented. That lead to producing some videos to show coaches and athletes what I did at practice. From there is just grew.

The tagline of the blog is “A resource of coach and athletes” and I hope I’m meeting that goal with the blog. I’ve really enjoyed the audio podcast interviews and I hope to continue doing that. If time allows this spring and summer I have a couple new additions to the site that I think people will find helpful.

What aspect of coaching gives you the most joy?

Helping an athlete transcend a former self. Your PR is ______ when you wake up, then you go out and run faster, that’s really special and I feel lucky to be a part of that process. But simply being at practice and working with people is great. I love doing that. And I must say that the two weeks of the Boulder Running Camps are my two favorite of the year because there are so many great questions and so many athletes hungry to get better and hungry to learn more about training and the sport.

What advice would you give to runners hoping to get into the coaching profession? Is it more about what you know, or whom you know?

Well, we could talk for a long time about this. So many people identify collegiate coaching as the ultimate goal. I was really lucky to be an NCAA Division I coach, yet it was a lot of luck. But the flip side is I took a job as a JUCO coach that some people might have considered beneath them. Being a head coach at twenty four was a fantastic opportunity and I’ll be forever indebted to Mark Wetmore for his strong encouragement that I take the job at Pratt Community College. But for some other people the path is a graduate assistant or volunteer position that eventually leads to a paid job.

One thing that has changed is that there is a generation of coaches in their fifties that all started as high school coaches, then moved to the college ranks. I think collegiate athletic directors need to look more closely at the high school coaches who are dominant in their area and seriously consider them. But the flip side is most high school coaches can’t (or won’t) take a job that is often $20k or more LESS than what they make as a high school teacher. It’s not uncommon for college coach to make hundreds of thousands of dollars less in their career compared to a high school teacher, assuming they both have a masters degree. So money is an issue. And another issue in collegiate coaching is recruiting. Recruiting never ends. You finish with the NCAA Outdoor meet in June and July 1st you need to be calling recruits. That’s the toughest thing about a collegiate coaching for a distance coach is that, unlike volleyball or even basketball, the calendar never allows down time.

But one thing that I think people who want to coach should consider is that there is no lack of adults looking for advice on how to run a marathon or half marathon. Frank Gagliano told me once, “Coaching is coaching.” I agree. Last year I got a lot of joy out of coaching four adults for the Chicago Marathon as part of Nike sponsored campaign. It was a blast. So if you have a full time job and want to coach, keep your ears open at the next dinner party you’re at and you may be surprised who wants to be coached. The only way you can become a coach (and become competent) is to start coaching.

What goals do you have for the upcoming year, coaching or otherwise?

My goals for 2012 revolve around doing a good job raising our four month old and three and a half year old. Next would be growing RunningDVDs.com by releasing some new titles – really excited about that. I’m really proud of www.amilersdilemma.com though it has been a lot of work. We are on pace to grow the Boulder Running Camps this year and that’s exciting. I write weekly for NikeRunning.com and I enjoy that work. Finally, I just finished shooting a series of videos for www.FindYourZone.tv (which will be adding running content later this spring) and I’m looking forward to using those videos to help runners with their training.

I consider Adam a friend and I’m fortunate to have him as a contributor to this site. This post on advice for a young coach is tremendous and I’m lucky that Adam took the time to share it here.

This interview talks about his coaching philosophy and how he works with distance runners. We also spend some time talking about Curtis Beach, then 2012 NCAA Indoor Heptathlon Champion, who Adam coached at Alburquerque Academy.

As with all the podcasts, you can download this podcast in iTunes – just click here.

What I think is so extraordinary about Peter’s progression is that the biggest mileage week he ran in his high school career was 33 miles in one week.  To me that’s really impressive.  In this podcast Coach McHugh discusses some of the things that went into Peter’s training – including his implementation of work suggested by Vern Gambetta – as well as discussing his work with other national caliber athletes he’s coached, such as Fran Lord.

As always, you can download this podcast in iTunes in addition to downloading it below.

I very much enjoyed coaching four marathoners via email and telephone last summer and fall as they trained for the Chicago Marathon. You can learn more about that project here. I’ve also had experience coaching elite runners from a distance, as Renee Metivier Baillie and I started working together when she was in Flagstaff.

Coaching someone online isn’t the same as working together face to face, but it can be very rewarding (for both coach and athlete). Running and training to run well are simple tasks. All an athlete needs is a willingness to follow directions and a capable coach who can guide them. I tend to be pretty hands on – we’ll have a shared online training document that I will monitor daily and I adjust every week based on how you’re feeling. I’m not the kind of coach who sends you four weeks of training and then you never hear from them again.

Most quality coaches are charging between $150 and $200 a month for their services. This deal starts at $200 and has a “buy now” option for $550.

You can place your bids on this facebook page – http://www.facebook.com/Steele.Cooperative.Preschool. Bidding ends at 8 pm mountain time. If you are the winning bidder they will send you instructions on payment (either PayPal or check).

Final thought. I would be happy to have someone “save” this deal, meaning you buy it now, and then you use in the 16 weeks leading up to a key race. For example, you buy it today but want to use it in your training for Chicago or New York. Great. We will talk about the training you should do before the formal 16 weeks starts, giving you time to gain fitness. Or as my college coach would say, time to “get ready, to get ready.”

Thanks for reading and again, I very much look forward to working with someone and help them reach one of their goals.

1. The 1,600m is roughly 80% aerobic and 20% anaerobic.  Thus, improving the aerobic metabolism is extremely important.

2. We will identify the critical zone for the 1,600m race in two parts – the last 400m and the last 200m. Specifically, for the 4:16 1,600m runner whose race averages out to 64 seconds per lap, the reality is that the runner needs to be able to run closer to 61 or 62 seconds in the final 400m and closer to 30 or 31 seconds for the final 200m.  We want to develop someone who can win tactical races, not someone who can only run evenly paced time trials.

3. The five biomotor abilities – strength, speed, power, flexibility and endurance – must be addressed throughout the weekly micro cycle.

4. Competency at five paces – 400m pace, 800m pace, 1,600m pace, 3,200m pace and 5,000m pace.

5. A progression of strides at 400m pace, 800m pace and 1,600m pace should begin as early as possible in the annual macrocycle.

6. Posture and biomechanics need to be optimized. A slight forward lean of 1º to 2º, allow the athlete to utilize the hip flexors and put force into the track, is the goal.

7. General Strength and Mobility (GSM) must be done daily to allow for the intensity and volume of the running training.

8. Speed Development work needs to be done periodically to improve not only maximum speed, but also to improve Running Economy (RE).

9. The ability to run several types of races – sit and kick race, evenly paced race and races where the paces speeds up, then slows – is critical.

10. Ideally, the 1,600m runner will have the speed and power and anaerobic capabilities of a capable 400m runner, as well as the “aerobic engine” of a 5,000m runner. When in doubt, the coach and athlete should come back to this duality and ensure that their training is empowering the athlete with the abilities of both a 400m runner and a 1,600m runner.

Those were the words my undergraduate exercise physiology professor loved to share during our discussion of the anaerobic metabolism. He rarely used the term “lactic acid” but rather referred to “lactate.” You should too. Your muscles don’t produce “lactic acid” but rather, they produce a compound called “lactate” in response to intense exercise, exercise where the energetic need in the working muscle is higher than can be produced by aerobic metabolism alone. But the cool thing about lactate is that your body can use it as a fuel source. Another professor of mine used remind us that “the heart loves lactate” as an energy source (just as the muscles love using stored glycogen). And what you’re probably thinking is, “Wait – I thought the muscle soreness I feel after a hard workout is from the lactic acid?” Nope. The soreness is primarily due to a mechanical breakage at the cellular level of the muscle. You end a track workout with a certain percentage of your muscle cells literally broken (and you’ll need some recovery time to allow them to repair…which they will).

So why all of this exercise physiology? Simple. I want you to embrace lactate, and workouts that introduce lactate, as part of the path to becoming a better runner. I love to assign athletes fartlek workouts where the “on” portion is run faster than threshold pace. Running faster than threshold pace will bump up the amount of lactate in the system. This is followed by running the “off” portion slower than threshold pace (still at a steady pace), allowing the body to deal with the lactate and make a physiological adaptation. The bottom line is that you can teach your body to become better at dealing with lactate and this efficiency helps runners from 800m runners to marathon runners.

The project is A Miler’s Dilemma, which is a fictitious story of a talented high school runner Daniel Hart.  The story follows his struggles to achieve his potential.  AMD is designed to tell a compelling story that is accompanied with sound training material woven into the story. The hope is that AMD is a story that high school runners and high school coaches will want to follow as the story draws them in. The training advice in the story models sound training specifically for middle distance runners, but also gives general guidelines of the essential training components for all runners.

The arc of the story is that Dan shows his exceptional talent freshman year, only to lose his coach to retirement his sophomore year.  Dan then begins training in foolish ways and encounters disappointment in his performances through his junior year of cross country. It is at this point that Daniel begins to receive the wise coaching of Bill Willoughby.

Our intention with AMD is the following: 1. Tell an entertaining story that follows the real struggles and victories in running and racing. 2. Demonstrate sound training. 3. Include extraneous multi-media material that makes AMD more than a read, but an educational exploration of many different topics and interests beyond running. 

We’re excited about the layout of the site as AMD looks great and is easy to read on smartphones, iPhones and iPads.

Unlike this blog, we won’t have a comments section following each post. However, we have a twitter account and a facebook page set up for Dan Hart, and we plan to interact with readers via those sites.

Thanks for reading and I hope you find AMD something you’ll want to check daily.

1. For many beginning runners it is difficult to run without developing a lot of soreness, what is the best way to address and prevent soreness.

Well, the first thing to ask is “Where is my soreness?” If you’re sore in your quads and your butt, that’s fine. Arthur Lydiard, arguably the most influential distance coach in the history of the sport would say “expect quad soreness for the first two years of serious training.”

If the soreness is in the gastric, the soleus, the planter fascia – basically anywhere from your knee to your big toe – then you need to be worried. But in those areas the sensation will probably be “pain” and not “soreness.”

If you have a good coach guiding your training then you’ll be able to deal with a little soreness a the outset of your training, but when the key competitions arrive your legs should feel fresh an poppy.

2. For someone who has never run a marathon and is just beginning running, but has a major goal like a marathon in mind, how would you tell them to begin their training?

I think the most common mistake the people make when they identify the marathon as a goal is that they fail to a) give themselves enough time to properly train and b) they don’t value 5k training and 10k training as intermediate steps toward their ultimate goal of running the marathon. Ideally the person coming off the couch would give themselves a full year to train for a marathon. That way they could break the year into four parts: 5k training, 10k training, half marathon training and marathon training (each part being three months of training).

If you’re interested in what a 5k training program for a novice looks like, you’re welcome to check out this training schedule (and the accompanying videos) that I created for NikeRunning.com.

The bottom line is that one key to marathon training is a 20 mile, or longer, run. If you’ve never run before it’s going to take you months, not days and weeks, to get to the point where you can safely handle that task.

(Note: If you just want to finish a marathon check out Jeff Galloway’s walk-run approach)

3. When and how should you stretch: before a run, after a run, both or only after a warmup?

I highly recommend Phil Wharton’s Active Isolated Stretching (AIS) for anyone who is serious about staying healthy. Here are a couple of resources:

His site – click here
Video – click here
Running Times Article on AIS – click here

The other thing to consider is as follows: the Lunge Matrix (LM) before every run, then some General Strength and Mobility (GSM) after every workout

Lunge Matrix – click here
Eight Week GSM Progression – click here

Here are some more thoughts on stretching.

4. For someone who has been running for years and has hit a plateau how do they reinvigorate their training to run faster?

Usually there are two key changes that can be made. First, they tend to run all of their runs at the same pace. Big No-No. You want to have easy days where you run slow, threshold workouts or fartlek workouts where you push the pace, then long runs or progression runs where you are running marathon pace at the end of the run.

The other mistake I see adult runners make is that they’ve given up on strides in their training. Hill strides or flat strides are a staple of any intelligent training program and adult runners often feel like new runners after a few weeks of doing strides two or three times per week.

5. What is proper form for a runner, if you have a runner that has run a certain way all their life would it be beneficial to change their form?

Posture and footstrike are the keys I look for. Good, erect posture, with a 1º or 2º forward lean from the hips. This should then allow the foot to strike under the hips, not out in front of the hips. If you do these things then you’ll be fine. I worry less about the upper body as those changes are more difficult to make. Here’s a good resource if you don’t understand what I’m talking a bout – http://www.goodformrunning.com/

6. When designing a program for a beginning runner, what would be the main elements that you would include considering they would be running mostly 5ks and 10ks?

Race pace work at 5k pace and 10k pace. Running a touch faster than race pace on the repetitions is okay, but I like to design programs that have a goal race pace in mind, do some repetitions at that pace with a given amount of rest, then over the course of several weeks, see if the athlete can continue to run the race pace repetitions with less rest. But obviously a weekly long run is also key in 5k and 10k training. And daily GSM as well. And some threshold stimuli. Again, find a capable coach.

7. As director of the Boulder Running Camps you see many premier high school runners, how would you train someone at that age so that they excel, but at the same time do not burnout?

Obviously the key is to keep it fun and to make sure that the training is coming from the athlete, that they’re intrinsically motivated to train. Too often athletes run fast early in their high school career and then they put pressure on themselves to achieve more the next season. They assume they have to run more…and while that probably isn’t a bad idea, often they would see their times drop from simple infusion of more GSM, speed development work and a small bump up in intensity.

But to be honest, on the boys side, you don’t see that much burnout. The boys who come to my camp who love to run at age 15 still love to run when they get to college, even though some of them aren’t good enough to compete on the varsity for college or university they’re attending.

8. What is the one thing that you would tell someone when they are struggling with their running?

Find a coach to work with who has had success with athletes who have goals similar to yours.

9. You ran on the ‘98 Colorado Buffalo cross country team that finished third at the NCAA’s, can you tell me what it is like to train with one of the top cross country teams in the country?

I was the sixth or seventh man on the team. It’s pretty simple – I ran hard to keep up and not get left behind, be it on long runs, threshold workouts or Vo2max type workouts. It was fun, but as a guy near the back, not in a scoring position (top five score), you’re basically hanging on. Again, had a blast.

10. Some of the runners you have coached won national titles, how is it different coaching professional runners?

You can expect a lot in terms of the volume of the training (100+ miles a week), intensity (they run fast), ancillary work (they spend several hours a week on non-running activities) and recovery (ideally they train, eat, sleep, repeat). But some of the fundamentals regarding the human body’s adaptation to training are the same for elite runners as they are working adult recreational runners.

…but then again there is a huge difference on race day. If you race poorly as a professional runner then you can’t make a living. So the pressure to perform is much higher for professionals on race day than collegians, high school athletes or recreational runners.

Thanks for the questions Andy and if people have further questions, please don’t hesitate to email me at coachjayjohnson @ gmail . com